Mitchell’s demonstration was impressive but, as the professionals knew, it proved nothing. Mitchell was arguing that a regular bomber could hit and sink a ship. He “proved” it by sinking the German ships. But the argument wasn’t over whether a bomb could sink a ship if it hit it; it was over whether a plane could hit the ship in the first place under realistic conditions. Mitchell’s opponents argued that there would be virtually no combat situations where enemy ships would be waiting motionless at anchor.
In actual wartime conditions, Mitchell’s theories were disproved. The planes that sunk ships were dive bombers and torpedo bombers (including the planes used at Taranto and Pearl Harbor).
I disagree. An opinion would be something like me saying Napoleon was the greatest general of all time. Saying that Peary was or was not the first person to reach the north pole is an issue of objective fact, even if the evidence is disputable.
the one about Peary is about the only one which qualifies. Cook almost certainly didn’t. Peary probably was where he said he was, within the limitations of his instruments. Whether any of them stood on the geographical pole, as opposed to a few thousand yards wide of it, doesn’t really matter anyway.
And, in fact, B-17’s were used at Midway, with very unimpressive results. OTOH, Japanese Betty’s (a two engined Bomber, which could and did also launch torpedoes) did sink two British Battle Cruisers who were able to fire back and maneuver.
The Crusades were a remarkably disorganized affair - for instance, the Franks beseiging Jerusalem elected a leader after the siege had already begun. I’m sure every individual crusader had his own motivations for what he was doing.
I’m taking a World History course (just finished, actually–final’s on Monday), and we talked about the Crusades yesterday. The prof suggested that the Pope had four main goals behind the first crusade:
Retake Jerusalem and other holy lands from the infidels.
Poke a stick in the eye of the Holy Roman Emperor. The first crusade was just a few decades after the Investiture conflict, and relations between the pope and the emperor weren’t very good, so the Pope invited all the rulers except the HRE to send troops on the crusade.
Get all the angry young men with swords to go kill someone besides each other. By uniting Europe under the crusades and sending the armies to foreign lands, the Pope could reduce internecine warfare at home.
Cement church authority.
Obviously, not all of these goals worked so well.
As for sacking Constantinople, consider that the Eastern and Western churches had been pretty well split by this time; factional disputes can be among the bloodiest. Not saying it wasn’t all about piracy, but the Crusaders may have justified themselves by seeing the Byzantines as decadent perverts whose version of Christianity was a mummer’s play.
My myth contribution? For another class, i just read Blood Done Sign My Name, an account of a murder in Oxford, NC in 1970. The author shows a pretty strong contempt for the myth that teh Civil Rights era in the US was characterized primarily by peaceful marches, in which whites, horrified at the level of violence shown to peaceful blacks by a few bad eggs like Bull Connor, tripped over themselves to give rights to black Americans. He portrays the civil rights struggle as a struggle, in which (among other things) black Vietnam vets planned military-style firebombings of white-owned businesses, and it was only in response to very real worries about an incipient race war that white leaders decided it’d be a good idea to sit down with the moderates and talk. I draw my new sig line from the book.
I’m taking a World History course (just finished, actually–final’s on Monday), and we talked about the Crusades yesterday. The prof suggested that the Pope had four main goals behind the first crusade:
Retake Jerusalem and other holy lands from the infidels.
Poke a stick in the eye of the Holy Roman Emperor. The first crusade was just a few decades after the Investiture conflict, and relations between the pope and the emperor weren’t very good, so the Pope invited all the rulers except the HRE to send troops on the crusade.
Get all the angry young men with swords to go kill someone besides each other. By uniting Europe under the crusades and sending the armies to foreign lands, the Pope could reduce internecine warfare at home.
Cement church authority.
Obviously, not all of these goals worked so well.
As for sacking Constantinople, consider that the Eastern and Western churches had been pretty well split by this time; factional disputes can be among the bloodiest. Not saying it wasn’t all about piracy, but the Crusaders may have justified themselves by seeing the Byzantines as decadent perverts whose version of Christianity was a mummer’s play.
My myth contribution? For another class, i just read Blood Done Sign My Name, an account of a murder in Oxford, NC in 1970. The author shows a pretty strong contempt for the myth that teh Civil Rights era in the US was characterized primarily by peaceful marches, in which whites, horrified at the level of violence shown to peaceful blacks by a few bad eggs like Bull Connor, tripped over themselves to give rights to black Americans. He portrays the civil rights struggle as a struggle, in which (among other things) black Vietnam vets planned military-style firebombings of white-owned businesses, and it was only in response to very real worries about an incipient race war that white leaders decided it’d be a good idea to sit down with the moderates and talk. I draw my new sig line from the book.
If he is actually fighting that myth, then he simply has the era and the facts wrong.
(Of course, whites never tripped over themselves to recognize the rights of blacks, even during the Civil Rights era–the Civil Rights Era was characterized by enough whites either recognizing the need or being embarrased into recognizing the need to accord blacks full citizenship, but “enough” meant only some small portion greater than 50%.)
However, if the author thinks that 1970 was part of the Civil Rights Era, he is simply demonstrating his youth. By 1968 and the assassination of Dr. King, the Civil Rights Era had been supplanted by the era of violent protest–against the War, against “the establishment,” and against commonly accepted cultural values. The Civil Rights Era might be considered to have extended from 1945 through 1966 or 1967, with its high-water mark the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By 1968, following two summers of riots and the murder of Dr. King, that era had passed. The work of the Civil Rights Era was hardly complete, and it is true that there were numerous conflicts of widely differing varieties throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s to secure in fact the rights secured in Law in 1964, but that was the work of a new era. His book may faithfully document those struggles–which were clearly part of the Civil Rights struggle–but that struggle continued into a new era.
Supposedly, the South was plundered by grifters and theive (carpetbaggers) from the North. It wasn’t true at all-the South was given complete freedom, and several southern stats elected black representatives. All of this was lost by the resurgence of the KKK, and the imposition of “Jim Crow” laws. The South was given a big chance to clean house, an didn’t do it.
That is a strange bit of semantic quibbling, I think. Who says the civil rights era ended in 1967, and so what? That’s got nothing to do with the central point about how African Americans obtained civil rights.
The sack of Constantinople was also a power play on behalf of the Venenians, who wanted to neutralize their competitors for control of the Eastern Mediterranian and the Black Sea. It worked, too - by time Venice left after some 60 years, the Byzantine Empire was such a hollow shell that it was left wide open for the Ottomans half a century later.
Lincoln said that he would have kept slavery to avoid avopid war. He never said that he would allow it to spread into the territories, though. Admitting free states from the west would have isolated slavery to the southeast corner of the country, and eventually would have meant its demise. The southern politicians who promoted secession recognized that.
I think an interesting, and perhaps controversial story to add to this thread is that of Denmark Vesey, widely considered to have fomented revolution in Charleston, SC, in 1822, and executed along with 34 other black men.
Vesey has often been held up as an example of an insurrectionist, a black man who sought to fight oppression and slavery. He has served as an example for historians seeking to find black “agency” in the antebellum South, and for African Americans looking for heroic figures in a historical period of unimaginable difficulty and hardship.
But over the past few years, historian Michael Johnson has argued that Vesey was really not an insurrectionist at all, and that his “trial” and subsequent execution were really a product of white paranoia, politics, and conspiracy. There was no trial, in the properly accepted sense of the word, according to Johnson. Rather, the whole thing was little more than a frame-up, with blacks facing a choice of telling whites what they wanted to hear or being killed as conspirators in the alleged plot.
My short post can’t really do justice to the amazing detective work and the complexity of Johnson’s argument, but his work on Vesey has caused historians to reconsider what had been, until a few years ago, one of the commonly-accepted “facts” of American history. If you want to read the whole article where Johnson lays out his case, see Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, vol 58, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 915-976. Summaries of Johnson’s argument can be found here and here.
The WMQ article actually started out as a review of three books about Vesey, and Johnson found so many errors in one of the books he was reviewing that the prestigious University of North Carolina Press pulled the book from publication.
Disclosure: Mike Johnson is a Professor in the history department where i’m a grad student. I know him well, and taught with him last semester.
I had a Filipino friend of my father’s tell me once that the Americans who fought in the Spanish-American war in the Philipines were actually a rather trivial piece of the puzzle- the Spanish surrendered to the Americans because it was a hell of a lot less embarressing to surrender to the Americans than to surrender to the Filipinos who were besieging Manila and occupying the rest of the country.
I guess I object to substituting one set of simplistic claims to replace another.
First, I know few people who believe that whites “tripped over themselves to give rights to black Americans,” although a claim that appears to dismiss the revulsion of many whites to the actions of turning dogs. clubs, and firehoses on peaceful demonstrators and the fact that actual laws were passed (or overturned) based on that revulsion is, itself, simply a form of myth-making based on a denial of history.
It is certainly true that the struggle did not end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (or, in some cases, that it has been completed yet), and there were incidents as late as the 1970s similar to the one in which a town council, voted out of office by a newly emerged black electorate proceeded to bankrupt the town with spurious spending so that the new council would be unable to maintain even basic services.
But if the author is going to “debunk” a myth, it helps if he does not deny the parts of it that were true or that he does not subsititute a new falsehood.
I am not going to defend to the death an ending date for the Civil Rights Era, but there were clearly two separate phases if one wishes to include the actions prior to 1968 and subsequent to 1967. (And there were aspects of each phase that overlapped, of course.) But to claim that it is false that the Civil Rights era was “primarily” characterized by peaceful marches met by violence that resulted in changes to this country is, itself, false. As a result of those peaceful marches so cavalierly dismissed, Federal laws were changed to eliminate blatant discrimination, poll taxes, reading requirements for voting, and similar actions. It is also true that in the same period, point systems for housing were abolished, block busting was outlawed, and the original (pre-quota) Affirmative Action policies were established. To pretend that none of these things occurred is to deny genuine history.
Now, if his main point was that the Civil Rights movement was driven by black demands rather than being the result of the largesse of the white community, I would agree, but that is not how you portrayed his claim.
If he is pointing out that the Civil Rights movement required two separate actions, one to get the laws changed and a grittier battle to get the changed laws enforced, then I would agree to that statement, as well. However, your post said that the author had contempt for one myth, but the myth you described is very close to actual history for a specific period.
First, I really think you’re looking for a fight where none exists. A request for clarification would do wonders. Here’s how I characterized his book:
To be more specific: while he acknowledges these peaceful marches and the power of them, he also acknowledges that the laws passed in response to them were roundly ignored in huge sections of the South by the white power structure. He also points out that there was plenty of violence by forces other than King’s, that Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary” got plenty of attention among whites, and that plenty of whites negotiated with King because they were scared of X. He interviews veterans who, responding to the continued Jim Crow in 1970, started a campaign of arson against white-owned businesses; he interviews the nonviolent leaders who finally got to sit at the negotiating table as a result.
If you know “few people who believe that whites ‘tripped over themselves to give rights to black Americans,’” I invite you to go to the children’s section of your local library and check out the books on civil rights that are used to teach kids. At least when I was growing up, elementary school was the primary time that we learned about the civil rights struggle; what we learned was not a nuanced story, in which the demand for rights backed by the threat of violence was one necessary part of obtaining those rights.
This review of the book in the Washington Post might be helpful; they quote a passage from the book that states what I’ve been saying more eloquently:
… has a false history of something being slapped together by hobbyists in garages.
What is discounted is that these hobbyists were then currently employed by either (a) the computer industry (Steve Jobs at Honeywell, the traitorous eight who founded Fairchild (2 of which left Fairchild to found Intel)) or (b) the government (Basco at Stanford, Spacewar at MIT (and Bushnell, who played Spacewar during his days as a subsidized grad student at U. of Utah (one of the four universities to be involved in the initial DARPANET project))).
Much of the industry was largely developed by the use of government monies and organizations, largely for military purposes, coupled with the legal restriction that the government/universities themselves not directly involve themselves with production or running commercial enterprises. This results in a situation where “underpaid” professors are producing items of vast commercial value, developed by government/military subsidy. To realize the commercial value of the technology, a procedure developed that allowed the subsidized developer to leave, taking the technology with them as long as they properly licensed the technology from the institution that subsidized its development.
It was not put together by hobbyists in their garage, using their own resources and funds. The few garage hobbyists that we hear about all were employed by the computer industry (or universities), using components built and developed by others. The standard “garage hobbyist turned industrial leader” did little more than develop a business model based upon a product manufactured by slapping already-existing components together, selling the idea to venture capitalists, and then licensing the necessary technology once the seed money came in.
Oh, and myth building. There’s a lot of myth building involved here.
With a few exceptions (Gates being the obvious one, Watson the other), the development of the computer industry, and the Internet, pre-1980 (and definitely pre-1960), is completely the result of an industry being supported by massive government subsidies until it reached a critical point by becoming self-sustaining, commercially viable, and, just as important, lodging itself in the general public’s awareness as to it’s desirability.
I think what saoirse is saying is that the southern politicians recognized that the prevention of slavery in the new territories would mean the demise of slavery across the country.
The “one slave, one free” policy of letting states in had kept the Senate balanced on the slavery question, even as the House was skewing more and more abolitionist; if all new states that came in were “free”, then the Senate would be hard pressed to continue to protect slavery.
Supposedly, someone hit upon the bright idea of bombing ball bearing factories in Germany. Reason being that if there were no ball bearings, the German military machine would soon grind to a halt. During the war, the Allies bombed the crap out of the bearing factories and waited for the military to come to a halt, which didn’t happen. After the war, it was found that Germany had only one bearing factory left, and that was what had been supplying the entire war effort. (IIRC, recent discoveries have revealed that the Swiss were covertly supplying the Germans with bearings, the Swiss military having gone into a bit of a decline before the war, and realizing that if Germany decided to invade them, there was a whole lotta nothing they could do.)
And while the Soviet tanks were clearly some of the best in the world during WWII (much better than the US “Ronsons”), much of the rest of their equipment was subpar, and it was the adoption of US designs which enabled them to hold their own against the Germans. (I think that the Soviets continued using the Studebaker designed military trucks for decades after the war, but I could be wrong on that point.)
