The new “chroniclers” of America’s past would transform our history to paint the United States a systemically bigoted state founded on racism in 1619. The most fraudulent aspect of this dishonest scheme is that it fails to address the salient characteristic of slavery in the United States and Europe: the near elimination of slavery in the West by the mid-19th century. This means that slavery as an institution was carried on in Europe for about three centuries from the beginning of the Enlightenment and then, in the blink of a historical eye, banned and made illegal. Within less than a century from 1800, legal slavery had been ended worldwide thanks to the ideas of the European Enlightenment thinkers.
