After getting past the colonial & revolutionary historical periods (which I find really boring), I’m finally getting to the good parts of A People’s History. Two things that kept me awake last night:

“Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.”

He’s talking about the 1880′s and 1890′s! I also thought this passage, on the same page as the previous paragraph, was also really interesting:

“Carnegie gave money to colleges and to libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system-the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians–those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.”

Two years since I graduated college and I’m finally doing some book learning.