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To: x; stainlessbanner; lentulusgracchus; rustbucket; 4CJ
You said:......Over and over again I hear that the North isn't less bigoted than the South. It's just that Southerners are honest or upfront about it. Well, here's Brown University being upfront and honest about the role of slavery in their universities history, and you don't give them credit for that.

Setting up a strawman, there x? You know that is not the point.

You said:......"One version of Meyers’s paper — the one I linked to in my original post — is here. He says, as I quoted in my last post: “The early master builders were brought from England, but local contractors for the Wren Building supplied the laborers, who included, noted Lounsbury, two of President James Blair’s slaves.”

You keep quoting Terry Meyers. He does not have any first hand documentation at all. Do you realize the maze of confusion that Meyers is using to set up that speculation as having some sort of relevance?

Well, if you will check the footnote from the paragraph you cite, that is #3, he does not have the actual documentation of the point that you think is so important, and have posted and re-posted. Get it through your head that he does not have first hand proof but quotes one James D. Kornwulf, "So Good A Design: The Colonial Campus of William and Mary".

If you do an internet search for Kornwulf's work, you can read his quotes on the construction isssue, you will find that he does not have any first hand information either.

Interestingly, he then refers you to an alledged quote from another source (getting frustrated here at the convolutions?) Earl C. Hastings, Jr., and David Hastings in their work, A Pitiless Rain: The Battle of Williamsburg, 1862.

However if you dig even deeper, you will find that even that book is not recognized as a fundamental source tool.

The peer review of this work was done by one Michael B. Chesson , Department of History, University of Massachusetts-Boston, who had this to say about the work of Hastings:

..."the book bears many of the marks of a rush job and does not meet the publisher's usual high standards.

If you read on, the reviewer points out a number of errors, mis-representations, and false contentions.

Would you want to base your reputation on a quote from this book? No, I think not.

So, esentially you still have no proof, just suppostion, quotes, re-quotes, assumptions, conclusions, and blather..........the usual from you, sir.

72 posted on 03/11/2008 12:03:47 PM PDT by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge; Non-Sequitur
Would you want to base your reputation on a quote from this book? No, I think not.

How is citing one book for a fact in one sentence "basing one's reputation" on anything? If you're concerned about this, see if Meyers cited the right page and if the Hastings got their facts right. But really your quibble has nothing at all to do with what we were discussing.

..."the book bears many of the marks of a rush job and does not meet the publisher's usual high standards.

It helps if you quote the complete sentence:

The research, thesis, and conclusions of A Pitiless Rain are persuasive, but the book bears many of the marks of a rush job and does not meet the publisher's usual high standards.

Chesson's complaining about the kind of technical errors amateur historians make, but he's not attacking the book or its conclusions.

I guess you're still ticked off about that wretched DiLorenzo. Maybe Walter Williams too. But really, if writing what they've written hasn't destroyed their careers there's no reason for Meyers or the Hastings to fear for anything they've written either.

Setting up a strawman, there x? You know that is not the point.

I know nothing of the kind. Your quiz was set up to establish that Northerners were hypocritical or dishonest about slavery. Here you have an institution, Brown University, that is honest and upfront about the role of slaves, slave owners, and slave traders in its history and you try to single it out as worse than other institutions that haven't been as concerned or as diligent in researching the role of slavery in their own past.

Brown's really gone out in front on this. And they had existing records that indicated the role of slavery. The Wren Building, the oldest building at the College of William and Mary, was destroyed by fire at least three times. Perhaps the records haven't survived. Perhaps their record keepers didn't bother to name the slaves who worked on their buildings since payment went to the masters. We don't even know if Christopher Wren actually designed the building that has been named after him. So there's a lot to discover.

William and Mary hasn't investigated the question of slavery to anything like the degree that Brown has. Go back to an 1874 history of the college. It doesn't even mention slavery. Maybe there really were no slaves involved in building CWM's structures, but I'll wait until they've looked into this at least as deeply as Brown has.

And what about those links I posted to information about UVA and UNC?

73 posted on 03/11/2008 5:20:33 PM PDT by x
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