You make good points about the widespread adoption and great value of crops from the New World. But that wasn't my point. My point was only this, because the original story claimed otherwise: The settlers would have been fine without those crops.

Of course, corn and potatoes and so on have been fabulously beneficial globally, and they came from the American continents. That didn't have anything to to do with the inaccuracy that I was correcting, however.

Similarly, I never said that there weren't slaves in the North. The claim was that slaves were necessary to feed the colonists, but the widespread success of northern farmers without slaves (slaves were only ~2-3% of the population of New England around the time of the revolution) indicates that this is an overstatement. Indeed, most of the slaves in the north were used for non-agricultural labor (in cities like Boston).

And I also never claimed either that important infrastructure wasn't built by people of color, nor that they weren't often used in the most dangerous jobs, nor that accomplishments of people of color were for a very long time minimized, ignored, or reassigned to white people. Yes, all that happened. My only point was that even so, "white people" mostly did build the country. Not completely, not by a long shot. But the people working on coal mines, steel mills, skyscraper construction, road building, yes, railroads, were very often overwhelmingly white simply because that's who was around to do the work. (If the work was difficult and unpleasant, usually the most recent immigrants would be the ones who would find themselves with those jobs, but the immigrants were mostly white.)

So, respectfully, I don't think you have a particularly comprehensive picture of the development of the United States. I don't think I do either (I'm not a historian, just curious), but I do have a halfway decent sense of the demographics of many of the main industries.

You're also implying that I'm saying things that I'm not. This isn't an all-or-none matter: either people of color built the WHOLE country or white people built the WHOLE country. How silly! Of course that's not how it worked--people built what they built, and people of color (and recent immigrants) generally built more than their fair share while receiving less than their fair share of wages and credit.

But when the claim is that white people didn't build the country, well, that's just wrong. They did, quite a lot (but not all of it). And that is what I was pointing out.

For the record, I think that the degree to which accomplishments have been reassigned and suppressed is absolutely shameful. I'm glad that we're finally starting to rediscover and restore some of the credit to its proper place. But fixing the view that "only white people can do worthwhile things" does not entail adopting the view that "only non-white people can do worthwhile things". Lots of people of all races have done lots of worthwhile things, and they should fairly receive credit for it (and a bonus helping if they've been overlooked).