[V K Lee]

More at link

[MrEdd]

Oh look. A steaming pile of revisionist drivel, written as a paean to the concept that truth is relative.

[yarddog]

“History is lies men have agreed on”.

Well not totally but to a large degree.

[Talisker]

We tell ourselves and each other that perhaps our motivations were more noble than they really were at the time. We tell ourselves that what we did, we did because a greater good necessitated it. We tell each other that it’ll all be okay in the end because we lived in pursuit of a noble cause. What action arises from these untruths is, we trust, better than what could have been were we to view ourselves with the coldly rational light of pure record.

The grotesque, horsified, rock-crude, clueless manipulation is strong in this one.

[Larry Lucido]

More at link.

It can stay there.

[IronJack]

we write [history] in order to provide ourselves with a meaningful story.

First of all, a good historian doesn't "write" history. He RECORDS it. Second, maybe the story is meaningful without any embellishment. And maybe therein lies its value.

[2001convSVT]

“Who are public monument for?”

That easy, for politicians and elites so they can show the little people who they should worship.

[x]

No one would suggest that those who originally erected these monuments really believed that the cause of the South in the Civil War was wholly just, at least not for the reasons given in many an inscription.

No one? Nobody? "Wholly" sets a standard too high. It's hard to believe that Confederate spirit just vanished in 1865 and former rebels just hung their heads in shame.

What those who built them were doing was writing a therapeutic history. They were dealing with the grief of loss, both personal and social. They were seeking to redeem the past, to place a bandage over the gaping wound of war and hundreds of thousands of sons lying dead on battlefields across the country. They were hoping for a better world in the full knowledge that it was selfishness and denial of the humanity of others that had led to such pointless slaughter.

There is something in the idea of "therapeutic history," but I think he's projecting too much 20th or 21st century thinking back on the mid-19th century.

Even 50 years ago there were people his last sentence wouldn't describe -- not in the sense he probably intended it.

Like many Front Porch Republic articles this one's a little too airy and abstract, which is a little surprising if the point is to celebrate the concrete and local.

[RetiredTexasVet]

At least in some circumstances to celebrate “queerdom”!

[Ancesthntr]

Who Are Public Monuments For?

---

Pigeons.