HENRY FORD, the founder of the carmaker that still bears his name, declared in 1916 that “History is more or less bunk.” When asked to open a museum more than a decade later, he sought to clarify his comments. It is not politicians and generals who change the future, he said, but the lives of ordinary people such as farmers or engineers. Two new papers, presented at Britain’s Economic History Society's annual conference last month, suggest that the legacy of individuals’ personal struggles in America is more enduring than even Ford could have imagined. The first*, by Cornelius Christian of Oxford University, looks at the consequences of the lynching of black Americans between 1882 and 1930. Mr Christian found that this history of racial violence still echoes down the decades. He also found that the higher an area’s lynching rate before 1930, the wider the income gap between blacks and whites remained in 2008-12, even when adjusted for factors such as the education and employment levels of a local area. A high rate of lynching widens this gap by as much as 15% in some cases.

Another paper** presented at the conference, by Vellore Arthi, also of Oxford University, looked at the long-run impact of the Dust Bowl—a long period of drought in America’s central plains in the 1930s that involved a series of severe dust storms. Using census data Ms Arthi found that those who were born or were children during the disaster had a lower fertility rate than their peers from elsewhere in the country, were less likely to attend college and were more likely to suffer disability and poverty when they became older. As as other research has shown, some of these disadvantages, in turn, are likely to have affected the life chances of their children. In short, crimes that occurred a century ago and a drought that ended 75 years ago are still blighting lives today.



* C. Christian, “Lynchings, labour, and cotton in the US South”.

** V. Arthi, “The dust was long in settling: human capital and the lasting impact of the American Dust Bowl”.