re: What’s an American history hot take you’ve got?

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We should have picked our own fricking cotton.

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Poor white folks did. African slaves were a luxury of labor only their rich could take advantage of.

Think of it in modern farming

Poor folks / small farms do the work with a older and much less expensive tractor or by hand

Agra business can afford the large tracks of land and the REALLY expensive tractors

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However, the modern U.S. overdose crisis is dominated by synthetic fentanyl, which does not require poppies at all. So even if Afghanistan's fields had been wiped out, it's quite possible that traffickers would eventually have shifted toward fentanyl anyway because it is cheaper, more potent, and easier to manufacture and transport.

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There's no need/market for Fentanyl (synthetic or otherwise) without an opioid crisis that gets large swaths of the country hooked on painkillers. Heroin makes a major comeback, and fentanyl enters the lexicon directly because of pill-pushing and the addictive nature of opioids.

Which the effing Sacklers knew, and hid. They purposely targeted blue-collar folks with work injuries in Appalachia because the press DGAF about these people. In a just society, the Sacklers would be windchimes.

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Absolutely. Take the US out of the equation, Germany would have certainly won the war.

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Don't forget, until it became more profitable to destroy them, we funded Germany too.

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Babbitt definitely suffered the consequence of poor choices.

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Babbitt definitely suffered the consequence of Byrd's poor choices.
Good to go now.

MLK shouldn’t be revered and shouldn’t have his own holiday.

The revisionist history about Grant being an underrated president is mostly just about his racial stances, which were objectively good for the time. But really he was actually a mediocre to outright bad president because those stances even in our modern lens don't discount all of the scandals and corruption that occurred in his administration. He wasn't really corrupt himself, he just had no idea how to handle politicians and institutions under his control. He was a general, not a president.

"Property" should never have been replaced by "The pursuit of happiness".

Teddy Roosevelt is one of the only presidents that you could drop into the office at any time period in our history and he would still be considered a great president. Maybe the hot take there is the "one of the only" part. He might be the only one.

Sometimes you'll hear historians talk about the potential plan to fight the Soviet Union at the end of WW2. What we should have done (and some of this is hindsight) is help the Nationalist Chinese beat the communists. That almost assuredly prevents the Korean war and deprives the Soviet Union of a big ally, prevents Vietnam, and we have a relatively normal China in modern day.

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It wasn’t. It was about states rights, and the southern states’ argument that they had the right to tell their residents it was ok for them to purchase and own slaves. Those slaves happened to be black.

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If it wasn’t about slavery, then do you think the civil war still happens that year if slavery in the US never existed?

I don’t feel bad what happened to that black dude on American history X involve the curb

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If it wasn’t about slavery, then do you think the civil war still happens that year if slavery in the US never existed?

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Damn near happened in the 1820s during the Jackson presidency and the Nullification Crisis. Jackson wanted massive tariffs to protect burgeoning northeastern industry. SC said no, and that they were going to maintain their shipping and trade with France and the UK.