Posted on 09/08/2019 3:22:20 PM PDT by Drew68
CHARLOTTESVILLE — A Monticello tour guide was explaining earlier this summer how enslaved people built, planted and tended a terrace of vegetables at Thomas Jefferson’s estate when a woman interrupted to share her annoyance.
“Why are you talking about that?” she demanded, according to Gary Sandling, vice president of Monticello’s visitor programs and services. “You should be talking about the plants."
At Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and other plantations across the South, an effort is underway to deal more honestly with the brutal institution that the Founding Fathers relied on to build their homes and their wealth: slavery.
Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia, some sites are also connecting that ugly past to modern-day racism and inequality.
The changes have begun to draw people long alienated by the sites’ whitewashing of the past and to satisfy what staff call a hunger for real history, as plantations add slavery-focused tours, rebuild cabins and reconstruct the lives of the enslaved with help from their descendants. But some visitors, who remain overwhelmingly white, are pushing back, and the very mention of slavery and its impacts on the United States can bring accusations of playing politics.
“We’re at a very polarized, partisan political moment in our country, and not surprisingly, when we are in those moments, history becomes equally polarized,” Sandling said.
The backlash is reflected in some online reviews of plantations, including McLeod in Charleston, S.C., where one visitor complained earlier this summer that she “didn’t come to hear a lecture on how the white people treated slaves.”
The review sparked shock as it made rounds on the Internet. But stories of guests’ discomfort are familiar to many on the front lines at historical sites steeped in slavery...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Maybe some of the blacks there were foreign also, maybe even most of them.
Yeah, OK, yes indeed, you keep going on believing your nonsense and slandering people like me for bringing difficult things to attention and jump right on the leftie marxocrat bandwagon and virtue signal that your oh so special because you would never, ever put two and two together insuch a way that might make you out to be a rayciss cause your a real freeper, uh huh.
Yeah, OK, yes indeed, you keep going on believing your nonsense and slandering people like me for bringing difficult things to attention and jump right on the leftie marxocrat bandwagon and virtue signal that your oh so special because you would never, ever put two and two together insuch a way that might make you out to be a rayciss cause your a real freeper, uh huh.
Good points. People want to see how they lived at that time. They don’t want an opinion of how things should have been by a snowflake from the low grade WaPo.
Omg. I loved the plantation tours I took in Charleston. They were all very honest about slavery and explained the lives of the masters and the slaves very respectfully to each. No preaching, no shaming, just honest history. I did want to hear the good and the bad of both histories told honestly, and I felt they did an amazing job.
Slavery was a historic fact and should be discussed honestly. However, slavery ended a century and a half ago and 50 years ago the civil rights acts ended the Jim Crow era. All of this is history, yet Democrats keep whipping up the slavery issue for votes. It was the Democrat party that supported slavery, created the Klan, passed Jim Crow laws and fought against the civil rights acts. It is time that there is an honest look at history.
Even though you are allergic to paragraphs, I read your whole post and agree. Your family gives you a different perspective. As does mine. Slavery is abhorrent. Treating people like expensive farm animals is so ghastly and so morally wrong. Yet it’s better than when his government attempted to murder my dad at age 7. When your family barely escaped Hitler’s holocaust, slavery seems like just one of many unspeakable things that can befall a group of people on this earth.
Excellent points...
Huh?
In 1865, how many Aztecs were around, the Native American situation had changed dramatically, and the Brit’s were no longer sending indentured servants.
I don’t understand your point.
Thanks I ordered both of them. My wife has already read the slave testimony book as she has written a few novels that are historical fiction based in this period.
And that’s exactly hour our tour guide handled it. Part of history.
These people who expect people of yesterday to live by today’s standards are delusional.
They had slave, were slave, how many Scots and Irish were slave in this country in 1865. The point is your point is pointless. They were not slave in the this country.
Does your wife have that same Weevils book or another similar one? I think there were other books of interviews done in 1930s; Weevils is a particularly good one.
Neither of the ones you named she has the one that has the white cover and it says slave testimony on it it’s pretty plain cover.
Ding, ding, ding - we have a thread winnah!
What shocked me was, that they used "Ice Cubes" in his day, for summer refreshments.
Almost every plantation had a great need for skilled tradesmen and women, and they ran what would today be considered subsidiary buinesses, such as the fishery at Mount Vernon that was a large exporter of dried fish to England, and the nail factory at Monticello that supplied much of southern Virginia. Women excelled at textile manufacture, among other trades. Skilled persons had the leverage to bargain for privileges, such as being the ones to accompany an overseer to another town to handle distribution or find new customers. They made contacts in these overnight excursions all along the way. A skilled worker such as a nailmaker, a ceramicist, a brickmaker, a boatsmith, etc, could be loaned out to another plantation or farm to "transfer technology" and would have found the recognition ego-rewarding as well as remunerative.
The Bible mentions by name quite a few artisans from 5,000 years ago who built the Tabernacle and Solomon's Temple. Likewise, many of the plantation artisans supported by Washington, Jefferson and other Founders also are known by name and recognized on these tours.
Before women's liberation, most women were supported by men and worked in home-based trades and crafts as well as raising children. It's not much different from the condition of the skilled workers on plantations -- room, board, clothing, heating, materials, tools and creative opportunities all supplied by their patron. Life could have been worse.
“A skilled worker such as a nailmaker, a ceramicist, a brickmaker, a boatsmith, etc, could be loaned out to another plantation....”
Better known as buying, selling or trading of humans without their consent.
While I was walking around the grounds a white woman asked me, "Are you an American?" She was confused about which path went where and needed to find someone who could explain it all to her in English. So she must have heard a lot of people speaking foreign languages.
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