Joseph J. Ellis is one of the most celebrated historians in the nation. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and once the holder of an endowed chair at Mount Holyoke, he was hailed by *The Washington Post* as the “most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period and…probably the most influential as well.” His best-selling books on Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other founders have sold hundreds of thousands of copies an d have been instrumental in forging a remarkable consensus, from left to right, that sees July 4, 1776, as a sacred date and a great leap forward for all of humanity.
But in his latest book, *The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the* *American Founding*, Ellis reconsiders the essence of his oeuvre and this consensus, which is akin to the pope reconsidering Catholicism. Focusing “on two unquestionably horrific tragedies the founders oversaw”—the “failure to end slavery, and the failure to avoid Indian removal”—Ellis seeks to understand how and why they happened. “Next to the failure to end slavery,” he writes, the “inability to reach a just accommodation with the Native Americans was the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation.” Charting not only the history of the republic’s founders but also the history that preceded and followed them, he outlines what he terms the “Great Silence”: “For more than four centuries, the most important voices of Western civilization remained mute as a highly organized program of unspeakable barbarity with genocidal implications flourished throughout Europe. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Erasmus, Locke, and all the Catholic popes regarded slavery and the slave trade as acceptable features of European society.” Why has Ellis chosen at this late date to break from the pack of rationalizers and justifiers? The antics of the 47th US president and his avid followers have clearly left him shaken, but more than that: They point to a pattern, “an inherently paradoxical pattern,” that “racism surges only after some semblance of racial equality becomes foreseeable,” which Ellis now believes runs throughout this nation’s history. It began, he notes, “during the American founding,” and “we are currently living through its most recent manifestation in the movement to ‘Make America Great Again.’” *https://portside.org/2026-07-06/banquos-ghost <https://portside.org/2026-07-06/banquos-ghost>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42377): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42377 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120183279/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
