A few days ago, I saw a chart showing what U.S. demographics believed that the United States invented slavery. I noted it for a future post, and now I can’t find it, but I found plenty of authority that supports that assertion. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, has been making this point for years. Way back in 2016, The College Fix wrote in part,
For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.
The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.
“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”…
The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.
“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix….
Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.
Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.
Ethics Alarms 
This is near Easter season: they show “The Ten Commandments” on ABC every year. Hello? Building the pyramids? Moses? “Exodus”?
Jack, just curious…Do you think Moses/the Israelites built the pyramids?
Not that I don’t understand and agree with your point, but I find it a bit ironic to use false history to prove false history.
I am mixed here. It is a common myth that slaves were used to build the pyramids; perhaps pervasive enough to just ever so possibly suggest slavery existed elsewhere, thousands of years before Europeans knew of North America?
Its also commonly taught that slaves often escaped to Canada, but I guess less common to teach that is because Canada abolished slavery in the 1830’s (along with its then British overlords).
Interestingly, Mexico also abolished slavery in the 1830’s, but we don’t commonly hear about slaves escaping south. Maybe it was because fugitives slaves hit the relative comfort of the free states along the way, unlike traveling through the deepest of the Deep South to get to Mexico?
The point, of course, was that Americans – colonists or citizens of the United States – were not the first to practice slavery. Whether the Hebrew slaves of the Egyptians were the ones to build the pyramids or not, the fact remains that there were slaves centuries before white Europeans set foot in the New World.
I think Jack’s just saying slavery was a pretty prominent feature in Ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa and the Middle East, all of which were treated in those movies.
My point is that the movie, based (loosely) on the Old Testament, which was written long before the colonies were established, referred to slavery and depicted it in a foreign context. Whether in fact Hebrew slaves built the pyramids (which pre-dated the alleged presence of the Jews in Egypt by hundreds of years, so that’s unlikely) I do find the absolute certitude that slaves were not involved in building the many Egyptian monuments bizarre. So they were Egyptian slaves, or maybe not. The point is that there are mountains of evidence, historical, legendary and literate, that refer to slavery being common long before America entered the discussion. Yes, I should have been more precise: would it have been better if I pointed out that “Ben-Hur” depicts galley-slaves and “Spartacus” shows gladiators, who were Roman fighting slaves? Greek mythology includes enslaved characters. One shouldn’t need school to provide awareness of certain realities. Popular culture is educational as well.A student who thinks the US invested slavery is illiterate as well as ignorant.
Why is this a surprise? The Democratic Party and their Education Departments have been teaching this since at least the 1980’s. The Democratic Party has hated the United States and everything it stands for. They claim ‘we have a right to criticize our government’, but they never have anything good to say about our country. These are not good people and they never have been.
The only countries who ever decided, all by themselves, that slavery was morally wrong spoke English.
Just leave this here….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPAAuG2pH8
If you find such a country that didn’t speak English, let me know. I am keeping a list.
So far, the list of countries that decided that slavery was morally wrong and sought to end it without being pressured by other powers is:
England
The United States
I know others abolished slavery, but many of them didn’t have slaves or the slavery they were abolishing was their own citizens being captured and enslaved. I am looking at slaveholding societies that woke up and decided to free all their slaves because slavery itself was morally wrong. Not a revolution that took the slaves from the upper class for political purposes or countries that claimed to ban slavery, but continued to practice it for some groups but not others. Mexico banned slavery in 1810 and 1813 and 1829 and 1830 and 1854 and I can’t tell when they really decided that slavery was gone. Turkey abolished slavery in 1830 and 1847 and 1854 and 1857 and 1880 and 1882 and 1889 and 1908 and 1924 and I think that a large number of people in Turkey today are OK morally with slavery since it is almost demanded in Islam. The Japanese outlawed slavery early in the 1800’s, but practiced it in the 20th century without moral qualms. It is really hard to find reliable sources because I keep seeing ones that claim that slavery was legal in Mississippi until 1995.