Answer:
Matt Yglesias has a good post that goes right at the “smiley-face” view of early US history–that we were a great country save for the regrettable aberration of slavery. He doesn’t pull any punches:
Specifically, white Americans conquered a vast new empire (Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas), populated it with millions of slaves forcibly transported from the Atlantic coast, and developed innovative new torture-based management techniques to enhance the productivity of this coerced labor.
Explanation:
