Study Questions Responses
1) Many white historians participated in the practice of “historical erasure.” By denying the importance of blacks’ contributions to the making and sustainability of America’s economic empire, it supports their false sense of American exceptionalism and individualism, and it tethers the notion that the Civil War was about slavery, a historical assessment that gives too much credence to the importance of blacks to American culture, politics, and economics. Moreover, the explanation of slavery being a ‘pre-modern’ institution becomes incongruent with not only the economic prowess that many American whites experienced during the enslavement of blacks but it also forces white historians