One, how should Americans think about the country's past?

well, we should try to understand the reality.

We should understand facts.

With regard to race, you know, Americans had slavery almost from the beginning.

and under slavery a racial ideology developed to justify the institution so blacks were inferior we had a civil war as you know the civil war was initially not fought to end slavery it was fought to prevent southerners from seceding it only gradually turned into a war against slavery and as americans came to condemn slavery that doesn't mean they gave up white supremacy so you know white southerners when they ratified the 13th amendment abolishing slavery they added resolutions making it clear that abolishing slavery didn't mean ending white supremacy we had a period of reconstruction where we tried to force some change in the south we forced white southerners to allow black people to vote and that worked for about 10 years we had some genuinely racially egalitarian politicians, true heroes, people like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, who really did believe that any kind of racism was a badger incident of slavery and it should all be abolished.

So you shouldn't have laws segregating railroads and you shouldn't have bans on interracial marriage and we should really just be colorblind.

But that didn't last because, as I understand it, the history of Reconstruction is white Northerners ultimately didn't fight as hard for racial equality as white Southerners fought against it.

I have

If, and maybe this is a incorrect interpretation, but if the articles were closer to unbridled democracy than the Constitution ultimately became and the articles really didn't work, how much of the framers' response was a legitimate response to this fear of what could happen if they didn't temper this in some way?

The, the articles are not really the problem, the democratic problem.

It's the state constitutions and the state legislature.

So the articles are problematic in the sense that they just don't create a very powerful national government, and the national government could issue requisitions, which are basically just requests for states to cough up money, but they had no coercive authority, and states treated the requisitions as voluntary.

So the articles are a problem, but the, the pro-- There, there are two different issues here.

One is the lack of power in the national government, and the other is these democratic state constitutions that were adopted mostly in 1776, 1777, when the Revolutionary War was being fought.

And the Revolutionary War is gonna be fought by ordinary people serving as soldiers, and it might be g- hard to get ordinary people to fight as soldiers if they're not allowed to participate in governance.

How do you think about that, that tension?