Your History Minute

Silver, to us, is the second metal--well, even the second medal--among precious metals. I mean, leaving aside Platinum, which didn't come into common currency until relatively recently. But, for much of history, silver was on par with gold. What changed? The discovery of the two most massive strikes of silver in history, one at Potosi, and one at Mount Davidson, near Virginia City, Nevada. Before those two strikes, silver had very rarely been discovered in great abundance, and certainly not enough of it to do things like, turn it into a tea service, for example. In two stunning instances, whole empires were brought to their knees but its sudden abundance. The Spanish, round about the time of their strike at Potosi, began a trade between the West coast of South America and the Philippines. To pay for goods (and to avoid the large swath of the world ceded to Portugal) the Spanish used what was most easily transported by them: silver. They found that China had not yet caught up to the...

A lot of our exposure to the personage of Stephen A. Douglas, the junior senator from Illinois at the time of the Civil War, comes from his debates with eventual President Abraham Lincoln, the minutes of which were celebrated by abolitionists in the North and others who were becoming increasingly concerned with the militancy of pro-slavery forces and their incursions into Northern territories. According to the former Governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford, Douglas had been trying to become a senator for many years, but he always found that he was against what people were for, and for what people were against, despite time and again trying to align his views with whatever was popular at the time. Douglas' rather crass defense of leaving slavery alone was only one in a long line of doing whatever was necessary to bring enough constituencies together to get him to Washington, an effort so often frustrated that the diminutive Senator was something of a legislative Wile E. Coyote. According ...