1 Matching Annotations
- Jan 2021
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trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
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There was not yet, formally speaking, an American people. There were, instead, living in the thirteen British colonies in North America some two-and-a-half million subjects of a distant king. Those subjects became a people by declaring themselves such and then by winning the independence they had asserted as their right.
- There were many American peoples. None of them were White.
- "those subjects became a people by declaring themselves such and then by winning the independence they had asserted as their right" - OK no. Quite a lot of people did not have the autonomy to "declare themselves" part of a people, and indeed were not recognized as such. There were also loyalists. And this idea of "a people" is...really complicated.
- While it's true that the first citizens of the United States were former British subjects, it is worth noting that a lot of other people lived in the current United States at the time who were tribal citizens, French colonists, Spanish colonists, and enslaved people who weren't considered citizens of anywhere.
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