Pat gets a no-prize for bringing us this op-ed about a "convenient amnesia":

Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New York," which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.

While the author does have a point, in making it I think he engaged in a bit of selective amnesia of his own, one depressingly common in the "history as Marxist allegory" circles of the intellectual left. Yes, the North engaged in the slave trade every bit as enthusiastically as the South in Colonial times, but it was the North which eventually sacrificed its sons by the thousands in a war among whose primary goals was the end of that institution. Britain is likewise often excoriated for its participation in the slave trade, with most history books flat ignoring the fact that it was Britain, and Britain alone, which used its power, money, and people over an entire century to end slavery as a global form of trade.

Redemption is a powerful experience of the human condition. The ability to right one's own wrongs through good work is perhaps the most noble aspect of our character. Nations, being made up of people, are every bit as capable of it. Little surprise then that the intellectual left, whose post-modernist foundations rest on well-reasoned efforts to convince humanity they are little more than squishy machines, does everything it can to deny, ignore, and "spin" it away.