Posted on 11/30/2019 5:20:16 PM PST by jocon307
Q. What was your initial reaction to the 1619 Project?
A. Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history. And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement. So I thought the account, which emphasized American racism—which is obviously a major part of the history, no question about it—but it focused so narrowly on that part of the story that it left most of the history out.
So I read a few of the essays and skimmed the rest, but didn’t pursue much more about it because it seemed to me that I wasn’t learning very much new. And I was a little bit unhappy with the idea that people who did not have a good knowledge of the subject would be influenced by this and would then have a biased or narrow view.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsws.org ...
I could have misunderstood him.
Sorry, but no. On page 586 of the paperback version of Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson states in footnote no. 30 "To answer a question frequently asked the author, he will state here that he is no relation to General McPherson.
Political correctness, aka ‘’Cultural Marxism’’ and The Frankfurt School of Transitional Marxism. Twin handmaidens of the Left.
The South chose a path of violent secession to preserve an economic system based on the use of slave labor in which an entire race of human beings were nothing more than property was abolished by a man who is held up as a tyrant. Wow. What moral idiocy.
I'm guessing you suffer from a government education and never went beyond it.
The Southerners VOTED to secede. The North INVADED the South. (Yes, the South fought back but almost entirely on their own territory.)
entire race
Some members of your "entire race" were, in fact, slaveholders themselves. See e.g. DIXIE'S CENSORED SUBJECT / BLACK SLAVEOWNERS.
ML/NJ ("Honest Yankee")
I went to Catholic schools you idiot. The South opened fire on Ft. Sumter. It started and a war and lost.
Ft. Sumter was in South Carolina. They VOTED to secede..
How did you feel about the Green Mt. Boys attacking Ft. Ticonderoga?
ML/NJ
we may still be one nation, but we have weakened all 57 states.
The plutocrats of the South didn’t give a damn for the will of the average Southerner, a good majority of whom did not want to secede. They chose to secede and attacking a US military installation in Charleston Harbor was their opening shot. The South’s decision to go to war doomed it from the start. I love how you Lost Cause Losers try to conflate the War For Independence, which the South supported with the violent treason of The Civil War.
There were a lot more folks in the North who wanted to let the South go in peace, than there were Unionists in the South.
I’ll just put you down as an opponent of self-determination.
ML/NJ (”Honest Yankee”)
Put me down as an opponent to treason.
I only knew it because I had read Battle Cry of Freedom late last year or earlier this year, so it was fresh in my mind.
"That is George Ticknor: It does not seem to me to as if I were living in the country in which I was born." McPherson is aware of the quote. It's at the beginning of one of his books and that's on of the few places on the internet where the quote turns up.
This had nothing to do with the war or slavery as Cambridge was essentially untouched by both. He was talking about our system of government. I once remarked in a class at an Ivy I attended as an adult, "Lincoln destroyed the system of government bequeathed to us by the Framers." After the class I spoke privately with the professor and his comment about my comment was, "Well, he had help."
Ticknor was apparently writing about a decline in political idealism. The old rural, agricultural, largely ethnically homogenous republic was gone and the new America was urban, industrial and ethnically diverse, less interested in politics than in business. That was something someone born in 1791 would likely have complained about if he lived until 1869. It was also very much the complaint a Boston Brahmin could have made at any time in the last two centuries.
Sure, you could say that the "Old Republic" ended, but that may have had more to do with social and economic changes than with anything Lincoln did. It wasn't that the hand of government was that much heavier in 1869 than it was earlier. It was that so much else in the country had changed. An old Boston Brahmin like Ticknor outlived his era and found himself in a new one. The Civil War was the biggest event, so it marked the change, but if Lincoln had done nothing, we'd still be saying that the "Old Republic" ended with secession.
Please spare me your expertise, if you don't even bother to read what I have posted. I own the book. (Do you?) I identified it and quoted from it in direct response to someone's reply/question put to me on this threas but you were too full of yourself to notice.
You're wrong about your interpretation of the Ticknor quote. You might read Richard Belsel's Yankee Leviathan (Subtitle: "The Origins of Central State Authority in America 1859-1877").
ML/NJ
I did indeed miss that, sorry. But "identifying" the book would have meant giving the title.
People on line shoot first and ask questions later. Even on this "threas."
And anybody trying to make a point is bound to be accused of being too full of themselves. Even you.
If you weren't you would have spared us the reference to your Ivy league class.
I own the book. (Do you?) ... You're wrong about your interpretation of the Ticknor quote. You might read Richard Belsel's Yankee Leviathan (Subtitle: "The Origins of Central State Authority in America 1859-1877").
I have both books and can spell Bensel's name. I'm not sure how that's relevant, though. Even Bensel admits that the Confederacy had more centralized bureaucracy than the Union and that the Civil War didn't leave behind a large lasting bureaucracy.
Democracy and industrialization had come to mid-19th century America and it was only natural that a Boston Brahmin like Ticknor would have trouble recognizing the country he was born in almost 80 years before. Ticknor had corresponded with and met Thomas Jefferson. It was only natural that he would feel out of place in a less aristocratic and agrarian country.
Maybe you were blinded by my proper use of italics in post #19 on this thread?
ML/NJ
If you really read every article and every comment before posting, congrats. Not everybody does and that’s understandable.
Lol
An irony lost on many here
The Howard Zinn of the War Between the States history
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