Political correctness at Little Round Top

TownHall.com ^ | 1/06/03 | Pat Buchanan

[the irate magistrate]

Give em' Cold Steel !!

[agincourt1415]

Problem is the underdog was the South and always will be a more interesting story than the North or getting into Slavery (which is getting a little TIRED), no matter what they try and do at Gettysburg. 70% percent of the reenactors want to play the part of the Rebel, LOL.

Robert E. LEE gets more screen time than any of the Northern Generals in any of the recent movies. Lets face it Mead and Grant are Boring.

There was no "Gone with the Wind" movie about the North, LOL.

Michael and Jeff Shaara wrotes books about the Southern side of the War, and I don't know of any popular books about the Northern side of the Civil War, are there any?

Slavery was wrong and the story of slavery is a little over exposed, we've had Roots and Amstad, and I don't see them being replayed much on TV, wonder why?

[WorkingClassFilth]

I agree, but like many of our problems, there are preceding layers of problems to be dealt with first. Immediate action in this case, or treating the symptoms, would be to get this guy muzzled and away from structuring policy.

To actually solve the problem, overturn the ban on firing civil service employees for starters. A total rout (and maybe a little time in stocks and chains) of the socialist traitors is another. Ammending some of the wrong conclusions about that war would be another.

Well, that would be a start anyway. Much better than growing more of the same invasive government while pretending to be conservative.

[stand watie]

i wonder when the BLACK CSA VETERANS are going to be memorialized by the NPS?

according to a damnyankee colonel, about 25% of LEE's army was BLACK & "were armed and dressed in the same hateful damned gray rags as all the other filthy rebel scum were".

i am NOT holding my breath until they tell the TRUTH!

free dixie,sw

[Fiddlstix]

This is not "political correctness", this is the spread of Liberal Socialism.

Well Said

[stand watie]

NOPE! UNTRUE.

the NPS has always served up a pack of damnyankee LIES, designed to deceive the ignorant & naive as to the TRUTH about the south's struggle for independence.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

well said.

CSMC bump.

[stand watie]

well said.

CSMC bump.

[stand watie]

smart dad!

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

TRUE!

free dixie,sw

[PeoplesRepublicOfWashington]

"Now all parks have to have some blurb about slavery."

Even Yellowstone?

[stand watie]

also well said.

free dixie,sw

[stand watie]

me too.

free dixie NOW,sw

[stand watie]

OK!

CSMC BUMP!

[sphinx]

Those who study the battle seldom go to the cute little displays anyway. The can stick the PC stuff all over the visitor center. I'll probably just visit the center for the coke/candy machines.

You left out the bookstore and restrooms (some places are a little too crowded to be watering the trees), but otherwise I'm with you.

I don't often approach the Park Service historians when I'm at a battlefield, but I do hobnob with them a bit at conferences and Roundtable events. They mostly strike me as solid-to-outstanding civil war military historians, as having a deep personal interest in the field, and as straight shooters on the political issues. When you get them out of uniform and away from their duty station (e.g. at a civil war conference), they are often fairly scathing about creeping political correctness in the NPS.

IMO, the real threat in NPS revisionism isn't that they'll bollix up Gettysburg, Antietam, or Shiloh. A Jesse Jackson, Jr. approved display or movie in the Visitors Center isn't the end of the world. The threat is that the NPS will, over time, change its recruitment and promotion practices and replace the military historians with social historians. That would be a loss of a very valuable resource. (For one thing, I'd have a much harder time finding Roundtable speakers.)

One already sees a lot more women staffing the battlefields, most of whom don't seem much interested in tactics, terrain, and the details of the fighting. We've had a few as Roundtable speakers when we want to vary our standard shot-and-shell program. The ladies do a perfectly fine job, but they want to talk about camp life, the homefront, care of the wounded, and how the soldiers celebrated Christmas. They go blank if you ask an order of battle or regimental history question. I'll grant that there's room for a bit (a very little bit) of social history at the battlefields, but I'd hate to see the military historians squeezed out, especially since most colleges give military history the back of the hand.

I recall a fairly hilarious rant on this subject from Richard McMurry, who is entertaining to begin with, to the effect that the reason most academic historians hate military history is pure envy. The military historians study something people are actually interested in. They write books that people actually buy and read, get to go to lively conferences, take interesting tours, and get out of the academic ghetto. He may have been right. Perhaps we have a professional historian who would like to comment.

[an amused spectator]

Bruce Catton wrote numerous good books about the Civil War, one of which is This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War.

[ZULU]

"Gettysburg to Tell Story of Slavery During War," was the headline The Washington Times put on its story about how the National Park Service "has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery." A $95 million visitors center and museum is going up to recast the battle in a new light.

"For the past 100 years," says Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar, "we've been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here. ... We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another."

Why the change? Unhappy that so many visitors to Gettysburg are white males, and so few are African-Americans, Latschar called in three historians to study how the Park Service was presenting the battle. The three wise men decided that the interpretive programs at Gettysburg had a "pervasive Southern sympathy."


Isn't the White House going to step in and stop this stupid bastard (Latschar)?

What he is proposing is inappropriate and irrelevant to the site involved.

The Gettysburg Battlefield is about thousand of Americans - MAINLY White Males - who fought and died for what they believed was correct. It was significant in the magnitude of human carnage on the battlefield and the the fact that it put an end to General Lee's (God Bless him) effort to bring to the north some of the same kind of human misery the North had inflicted on Virginia during the preceeding years.

Who the Hell is this Latschar character ANYWAY?? Who appointed him to his current position, and what is his education and political orientation?

Like the moles who run biased leftist news articles, Latschar is able to spin his web in the darkness of relative obscurity, invisible to the public he is hoodwinking.

[agincourt1415]

By the way I bought the book by Mike Shaara "Gone for Soldiers" you need to get it. Its the Mexican War experience of Captain Lee and his Mentor Gen. Windfeld Scott. Great Read for Lee, enthusiasts. Cannot wait to see the Movie "Gods and Generals".

[agincourt1415]

In answer to your question - Aircraft manufacturers use V-speeds to describe standard speeds for aircraft performance.
V - mean Velocity
M - means Minimum
C - means Control or Controllable
A - A was tacked on and that means clean or dirty (as in gear and flaps down or up), because this particular aircraft has the same speed posted for Flaps up or Down, in some aircraft these speeds would be different.

[ZULU]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll get it. I always loved and admired Robert E. Lee as a gentleman and a soldier, in every sense of those terms, and a man of dignity, honor and patriotism.

I was hoping for a movie some day just on Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, the greatest military mind the western hemisphere ever produced.

I'd put him in the same category as Hannibal, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Next to him, Apoleaon was third rate.