History professor Claudio Saunt created the above time-lapse, as well as a corresponding interactive map, to emphasize “the fact that the United States is built on someone else’s land”:
By the time the Civil War came to an end in 1865, it had consumed the lives of 800,000 Americans, or 2.5 per cent of the population, according to recent estimates. If slavery was a moral failing, said Lincoln in his second inaugural address, then the war was ‘the woe due to those by whom the offense came’. The rupture between North and South forced white Americans to confront the nation’s deep investment in slavery and to emancipate and incorporate four million individuals. They did not do so willingly, and the reconstruction of the nation is in many ways still unfolding. By contrast, there has been no similar reckoning with the conquest of the continent, no serious reflection on its centrality to the rise of the United States, and no sustained engagement with the people who lost their homelands.
Update from a reader:
“The fact that the United States is built on someone else’s land”. Um, isn’t this true of every modern nation? Isn’t it true that the Native Americans fought and killed each other to take land from their neighbors?
(Hat tip: Nathan Yau)
The Dish 