General Loss of Interest in studying the Civil War

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But there lies the problem...................Everything is being viewed on a "racist" level. Such as the view of "your" friend you spoke with....."it's Whitey's war"..............anything outside of his view get's labeled as offensive. Two words today control the narrative, and anything outside of "their" view, any conversation they do not wish to hear, out comes the two words............Racism and offensive...........The media controls what the general population hears.......

Respectfully,
William

One Nation,
Two countries
View attachment 310831

That, apart from politics, is the other tiring aspect of modern historical interpretation: everything is viewed almost exclusively through the lens of race relations. Historical figures are praised or condemned solely on how they related to minorities, and of course the vast majority are going to fall short. What no doubt started as a good thing, to recognize and more fully tell the stories of minoriities that past generations had neglected to tell, has too often turned into an endless parade of judging American history and finding it wanting rather than learning about events and admiring men who used to be admired. I don't think most people enjoy hearing their country's history badmouthed all day long, and it kills interest.
 
There's another two words : Hate Speech.

This is indeed a problem. The catch here is being able to detect when speech is actually being used as a weapon-- to intimidate, harass, etc.-- and on the other hand when defensible and constitutionally-protected expression is labeled that as a way of suppressing it.

Unfortunately, no hard and fast rule is possible here, at least so far as I'm aware. A lot has to do with intent, which is notoriously difficult to judge objectively.
 
That, apart from politics, is the other tiring aspect of modern historical interpretation: everything is viewed almost exclusively through the lens of race relations. Historical figures are praised or condemned solely on how they related to minorities, and of course the vast majority are going to fall short. What no doubt started as a good thing, to recognize and more fully tell the stories of minoriities that past generations had neglected to tell, has too often turned into an endless parade of judging American history and finding it wanting rather than learning about events and admiring men who used to be admired. I don't think most people enjoy hearing their country's history badmouthed all day long, and it kills interest.


It use to be inclusion for all, and equality. It has now become eradicate one aspect of history, and replace with another. It has become eradication of one Heritage, to be replaced with another's Heritage.

How can a Civil War/History museum, that is struggling to draw in visitors, take away one aspect of history, because that aspect of history offends some. You are trading an apple for a grape, and the grape won't show up.................A Civil War or History museum should be inclusive of ALL.

Respectfully,
William

One Nation,
Two countries
Confed-American Flag - Thumbnail.jpg
 
Far more then they deserved. Confederate's got off Scott Free and Unionists and especially African Americans were terrorized. Only a relative small handful of the racist paramilitary forces received their just rewards.
Leftyhunter
Unfortunately, peaceful blacks were to suffer the consequences of the actions goaded on by mostly white-led black terrorize groups like the Union League. Even more unfortunate for the Union League type groups they were to be abandoned by their white handlers once their usefulness had passed.
No evidence has been posted about the alleged misdeeds of the Union League. By your logic black people have every right to deny white Southerners there Civil Rights due to the suffering that black people endured in the South.
Leftyhunter
 
It use to be inclusion for all, and equality. It has now become eradicate one aspect of history, and replace with another. It has become eradication of one Heritage, to be replaced with another's Heritage.

How can a Civil War/History museum, that is struggling to draw in visitors, take away one aspect of history, because that aspect of history offends some. You are trading an apple for a grape, and the grape won't show up.................A Civil War or History museum should be inclusive of ALL.

Respectfully,
William

One Nation,
Two countries
View attachment 310846
It's all an over correction. Much like a teenager avoiding a squirrel from behind the wheel. Rather than an adjustment, he swerves, & wrecks the car.

You can't change what happened. Over correcting the narrative to slant it dramatically into the new preferred narrative isn't going to fill the museums, & parks. It'll make it worse. As Archie alluded to earlier in the thread, you can't alienate the majority, or at minimum turn off the majority, in hopes to bring in a minority of folks. Simple economics refutes this theory. The end result will be museums closing. No interactive, go see in person, history for anyone.

Maybe that's what some folks want. Sad in my opinion.
 
No evidence has been posted about the alleged misdeeds of the Union League. By your logic black people have every right to deny white Southerners there Civil Rights due to the suffering that black people endured in the South.
Leftyhunter

According to my log if law-abiding Southern blacks suffered as much as you are so wont to claim there would have been a mass exodus aided by their supposed Northern friends to more favourable climes.
 
According to my log if law-abiding Southern blacks suffered as much as you are so wont to claim there would have been a mass exodus aided by their supposed Northern friends to more favourable climes.
Bad analogy. Plenty of Jew's were massacred in Russia and Poland in programs in the Nineteenth particularly in the late Nineteenth Century. Many did immigrate to other nations but not a majority. Same is true of the American South in regards to black migration to the North.
Leftyhunter
 
Bad analogy. Plenty of Jew's were massacred in Russia and Poland in programs in the Nineteenth particularly in the late Nineteenth Century. Many did immigrate to other nations but not a majority. Same is true of the American South in regards to black migration to the North.
Leftyhunter
Barring restrictions against such migrations those who stayed put must have been satisfied where they were.
 
Here is where the Yankee hand-wringers should have helped them.
Many black people did move out of the South as did many white people. However not all choose to do so. It is not a certainty that all of a given people will immigrate when things are bad at home. Instead of condemning Yankee's for not doing more to aid black emigrants why not condemn white paramilitaries who terrorized black people?
Leftyhunter
 
Many black people did move out of the South as did many white people. However not all choose to do so. It is not a certainty that all of a given people will immigrate when things are bad at home. Instead of condemning Yankee's for not doing more to aid black emigrants why not condemn white paramilitaries who terrorized black people?
Leftyhunter


Perhaps one reason they may not have migrated to the North was they did not see it as being any better..................

Respectfully,
William

One Nation,
Two countries
Confed-American Flag - Thumbnail.jpg
 
I think one of the big issues with the American Civil War is that it often gets presented as and thought of as military history despite a lot of opportunity to talk about political, societal, legal, medical, etc. history. Like, I always like to talk to people about music of the Civil War and how it's one of my favorite parts to look at since there is so much you can gauge about the emotion/attitudes of the time from reading and listening to the stuff. However, every time I go "I love the music of the American Civil War" they cock their heads and look at me like the words "American Civil War" and "music" have never been used in the same sentence before.

The other problem with the Civil War's association with military history is that people go look at battles, generals, and some politicians and BOOM! You're an expert now! Why read a book about the war so thick you could use it as a cannonball when you can just look for some easily digestible pop history that is less dry for the average person to read and get what seems like "good enough" information on battles, generals, and some politicians? (mind you I am not a fan of most pop history, but "top 10 best/worst generals of the Civil War" gets more attention than "The entire table of organization and equipment of the 8th Rhode Island volunteer infantry" vol. 1 of 10).

People I think are just more used to having more drama and adventure in their readings and they want that same stuff in what history they learn (unless you're one of those nerds who finds the complete break down of how many cartridges were fired during the Peninsula Campaign vs the Gettysburg Campaign to be interesting :wink:).

Of course I think all that I said is only really a small part of a lot of different factors that play into this...

To go back to the topic of discussion, I’m not convinced that a “problem” exists. If someone has no interest in the Civil War, but he or she has an interest in some other topic (such as Alexander Hamilton, or World War II, or the Women’s Suffrage Movement, or the French and Indian War, or the Salem Witch Trials), so be it. Everyone does not have to be fascinated by the same war.

I do agree with the idea that people should study what they are interested in, some people I know have a deep seated interest in some of the most "minor" sounding topics in history

Also, I do think that part of the problem is that it's hard for something like the Civil War to compete with a topic like World War 2, especially since the "ACW on an international level" often doesn't get explored as much compared to "ACW as it impacted the United States"

As a point of reference, I have posted this before when the same "controversy" was discussed here.

It seems the more things change, the more some things stay the same. :wink:

This I think is an important thing to point out too. It always fascinates me how much different and yet similar humans are throughout history.
 
I remember back in the sixties the Atlanta Journal printed inserts of its paper back during the Civil War---Created much interest---And of course Ken Burns did his deal in 1990. In fact I believe Mr. James Robertson was part of the series. I do not believe except maybe Gettysburg that there has been much with impact to focus interest. Maybe Netflix will come up with something. Even the twilight Zone used to have stories about the war. One can already see that WWI is not remembered except by monuments and as the vets die out WWII will soon be the same. Computer games may be the only hope.

Does anyone know how this is handled in a place such as the United Kingdom? For instance, are historians in the United Kingdom concerned that people will forget about the War of the Roses?
 
The Common Cause by Parkinson.


As further...info:

Reviewed by Anna Leigh Todd (University of Pennsylvania) Published on H-Early-America (November, 2017) Commissioned by Joshua J. Jeffers


Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=50106


If scores of historians have looked to John Adams’s famous horological metaphor, that “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together,” for evidence of the extraordinary coalescence of Revolutionary fervor, Robert G. Parkinson in The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution finds greater promise in the second half of the quote. Evoking the act of fashioning implied in the verbiage “were made,” Adams went on to emphasize the manufacture of the clocks, describing their synchronicity as “a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.”[1] In Parkinson’s telling, this mechanism was encapsulated by the rhetoric of the “common cause;” its clockmakers were the printers and newspaper editors who crafted it (p. 5). Faced with the task of making the culturally familiar British foreign, printers and patriots rhetorically linked them to entrenched threats of rebellious slaves, menacing Native Americans, and opportunistic mercenaries--what he terms “proxies”--through the reproduction and dissemination of carefully crafted war stories. For Parkinson, this redirection of patriotic anxiety onto racial and cultural others is at the heart of “the American founding myth,” the foreclosure of the promise of liberty and equality for many Revolutionary participants and the predestination of an American citizenry defined exclusively as free and white (p. 24). This reality has been obscured, he argues, by its very representations. “With the war stories they would tell, refused to tell, or were ineffective in telling,” he writes, “the patriots would bury race deep in the political structure of the new republic” (p. 24).

(snip)

Representation, in fact, constitutes the core of Parkinson’s interpretation in that the common cause both sought political representation and relied on cultural representations to achieve that end. He pays careful attention to the limitations of a term popular among scholars--“propaganda”--which he deftly criticizes for its anachronism and “cultural baggage” (p. 17). Yet Parkinson also variously employs the terms “rhetoric” and “discourse,” collapsing other complex notions within the same process of the linguistic construction of a shared enemy without attending to their nuances and theoretical histories. He makes an interesting claim that the common cause gained legitimacy by selectively reporting on “real” events, but his frequent interchange of a fraught vocabulary leaves one wondering about the relationship between each of these terms and “truth” as well as the role of language in constructing reality. The term that is conspicuously and significantly absent from Parkinson’s theoretical framework, however, is “ideology.” In fact, he firmly rejects Whig ideology as the driving force of the Revolution: “Independence,” he argues, “was not an organic upwelling of patriotic fervor” (P. 262). Rather, in an important twist, Parkinson injects ideology with its own dose of conflict, arguing that the common cause “became as much about fear and outrage as the defense of inalienable rights” (p. 22). This dismissal of ideology with its connotations of the innate and universal serves Parkinson’s emphasis on the contingency of patriotism, its inherent prejudices, and the stakes of the contest over hearts and minds.


In order to trace the consequences of these representations over the course of the Revolution, Parkinson first must address its medium of distribution: the sinews of early American print. The book begins by painstakingly recreating the circulation networks of roughly three dozen newspapers and their publishers, linking them to committees of correspondence, a nascent American postal system, and the shift from an unbiased press to one increasingly dedicated to influencing political opinion. Particularly memorable is Parkinson’s case study of William Bradford’s Pennsylvania Journal, encompassing subscription records, distribution maps, textual materiality, and the process by which news items were received and recycled. Appendixes offer further data on Bradford’s paper as well as bibliographical information on other circulated titles, proving a welcome resource to readers interested in Revolutionary-era print culture.

Full review is here:
https://networks.h-net.org/node/858...ommon-cause-creating-race-and-nation-american
 
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions."

I'm pretty sure the DOI is talking about "savages" that are inside the borders, and not an external attack. In this case, the phrase "merciless Indian savages" serves as an Appositive Phrase to rename the "inhabitants of our frontiers."


Yes, just as Texas did. :wink:
 
Does anyone know how this is handled in a place such as the United Kingdom? For instance, are historians in the United Kingdom concerned that people will forget about the War of the Roses?

An excellent question that I can't answer. I hope some of our international members can.

Many parts of the world seem to have much longer memories though. I daresay the protracted (white) Southern bitterness toward the Civil War is probably one of the few times Americans show the kind of long-term grudge-bearing normally reserved for places like the Balkans.
 
Serious question: When has IT--history, law both State and Federal, etc.-- not been seen thru "such a lens"?

I can remember reading and learning plenty of history while growing up and going through school that wasn't focused mainly on race. If I had to pick a focus, it would have been on nations and prominent men and women in those nations and what they did. There were racial issues, particularly when going through early American history and discussing slavery, but it wasn't the be all and end all of historical evaluation like it is now.
 
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