Not to be one of those revisionists, but the Holocaust didn’t really have much at all to do with the war itself. It’s something that happened concurrently with, and that was affected significantly by the war, but in more of a one-sided way, with the war affecting the Holocaust, and not so much the other way around.
That’s not at all to downplay the Holocaust at all, but rather to put it in the proper perspective- the Western Allies didn’t do a thing about it, and neither did the Soviets. And by the time the mass-murder had ramped up to the highest levels(1943-1944), the Allied and Soviet troops were already on the offensive in Europe anyway.
That’s the sort of nuance that I think is acceptable. It’s not downplaying anything at all, and just putting things in their place.
And about Civil War memorials and statues… I don’t have a real problem with ones put up in the immediate aftermath of the war; it’s a bit unrealistic to expect people not to memorialize the combatants, victors or vanquished, of a war that ***killed ***something like 20% of fighting-aged men in the South, and somewhat less in the North. And I don’t have a real problem with battlefield memorials from any state or locality commemorating their troops. For example, the sort of town square monument listing all the local soldiers killed in service don’t bother me- they’re not glorifying the conflict or anything, but rather commemorating community members killed in service. Would we feel any different about a similar monument commemorating Iraq War dead?
I do think it’s pretty damned odious though that the governments in many Southern states put up a lot of romantic-type statuary and “Lost Cause” garbage statues in the early part of the 20th century- that seems to me to have been a big middle finger to the North and the Federal Government, and they picked an obnoxious way to do that.
I went to school in a middle-class suburb of Atlanta many years ago. I feel like overall there was a detailed and balanced treatment of the causes and events leading up to the Civil War, its highlights, aftermath, and reconstruction.
Years later, here are some areas where I now feel it was somewhat unbalanced:[ul]
[li]Slavery was discussed as a cause, but emphasized as a legal dispute over states’ rights. I am a bit shocked as an adult to learn how blatant white supremacy was woven into the Confederacy.[/li][li]There was some exposition about the Conferate leadership being not such bad guys, just sort of being backed into a corner.[/li][li]There was emphasis on Lincoln’s supposed hypocrisy in not really caring about slavery but preserving the Union (i.e. the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free slaves in the northern states).[/li][li]I remember very little being said about pro-Union dissent within the Confederacy, or its brutal treatment of its own citizens and soldiers. [/li][/ul]
Being in a cultural milieu that was majority Confederate-sympathetic, I feel like this faux “fair and balanced” approach was incredibly irresponsible and a disservice to us students.
Maryland is considered more culturally southern then northern. Even the Maryland State Archives says as much.
[QUOTE=Maryland State Archives]
In early 1861, Maryland was walking a tightrope between the Union and the Confederacy. In addition to being physically between the two sides, Maryland depended equally on the North and the South for its economy. Although Maryland had always leaned toward the south culturally, sympathies in the state were as much pro-Union as they were pro-Confederate. Reflecting that division and the feeling of many Marylanders that they just wanted to be left alone, the state government would not declare for either side.
[/quote]
Or rather leans culturally southern. There were enough people who went to Virginia to fight for the Confederates. Hell, there were state legislators that were arrested for voting to secede.
As for how I was taught in Maryland, we had two US history classes, one that went revolutionary time period through the Civil War, and the next year after the Civil War. I remember being taught that it was a states right reason to secede and little on slavery being the cause. We always did get to the Civil War right at the end of the school year so we didn’t talk that much about it.
I should explain that I made a post here and then thought it might be considered a thread hijack. So I deleted the text and replaced it with “NM. Sorry”
Then I started a new thread in IMHO.
I am posting this to try and clear up any confusion that I may have caused in this thread.
I’ll add that a common feature of rhetoric by both groups (American Southerners of the 1800s and German Nazis) was deeply-felt, frequently-expressed desire for their own personal freedom at any price. “The South will never yield to this tyranny/Germany must be free to manage her own destiny” sort of stuff.
While, of course, enslaving and killing others.
What you’re missing, I think, or what others have not emphasized in a way that you internalize, is that all those other regions (the Northern States, Europe, South America, the Caribbean) that had slavery eventually gave up slavery, either willingly or at least without a fight.* The bitterness with which (some) Southerners clung to slavery, the extremes of their self-justification, their willingness to kill and die for (or, more accurately, exhort someone else’s sons to kill and die for) the maintenance of the institution, and the importance they attached to their self-identification as “better than” slaves all come across to outsiders as both evil and hypocritical.
*To avoid unnecessary complexity, I am not going to address Haiti’s rebellion here, nor the Border States, which essentially were Southern in sympathy, trying to maintain slavery without paying the price of war.
My own experiences in school in Virginia were mixed – some regional apologism, mixed with attempts to understand the horrors of slavery. Mostly I remember a very lengthy and detailed unit on Reconstruction, filled with slavery apologies and an inexplicable hatred of how sharecropping and carpetbaggers had been bad for the poverty-stricken former slaves. Inexplicable in that said hatred was most vociferously expressed by corporation-loving, unfettered free-market capitalists who hated modern minimum-wage laws.
Not Stalin? Not Pol Pot? Not the Armenian “genocide”?
Do note that Pagans and Muslims were the primary slave takers, and slavery ended in the Ottman Empire in 1882(not really, but was made technically illegal, Brazil later, and in a few African nations- continued legally into the 20th century. So, not Christian and European any more than African/Asian Muslim/Pagan.
Yes, but the CSA and Lincoln knew full well that* saving the Union* meant the eventual end of slavery. That’s why the CSA left the Union. They knew Abe and Congress would start on the process.
Oddly the Agrarian society didnt collapse. True, it took a hit, but it was doomed anyway. In any case the South was completely against all compromise on the issue. If they had agreed that all newborns were born free and that trading would end after a decade, then it would have been accepted. But they left the Union rather than see any possible change to their peculiar institution.
If the CSA was fighting to defend their home, why did they attack the North to start? :dubious:
No Party was “threatening to deprive them of their wealth and property (slaves) without due process or compensation.”. Everyone talked of a slow & due process.
I graduated high school in 1966. We lived in an unincorporated area but the school district that had claimed us belong to a “Sundown” city–although I didn’t realize it at the time. The Houston ISD had segregated schools; the Pasadena ISD didn’t because there were no black kids. (There are now. The Tejano minority has become the majority & there’s a biggish Asian minority.)
Don’t remember details of the curriculum. I’m sure States Rights were mentioned. But I do remember a field trip to the Treue der Union monument in Comfort, commemorating a Confederate massacre of mostly German Texas Unionists.
I could go into great detail about what I’ve learned since then–as I have in so many previous threads. But I’ll stick to education. The elected & politicized Texas State Board of Education set up criteria for social studies texts; causes of the Civil War would be States Rights, Tariffs & One Other Thing. The Texas Freedom Network has covered the matter in great detail. What is actually taught in the classroom depends on the district & the teacher.
Interesting note: pseudohistorian David Barton, recipient of a BA in Religions Education from Oral Roberts & now head of Ted Cruz’s Super PAC was hired as an adviser to the SBOE. Who disregarded this article on his Wallbuilders’ site; Barton begins bemoaning examples of historical “revisionism”:
Blind pig, acorn, etc.
By the way, I do remember we learned about The Civil War. All that War for Southern Independence crap was for cartoonish Old Confederates with accents like Foghorn Leghorn’s. (My own ancestors were 50% Irish until after 1900 and 50% Midwestern.)
We didn’t get much about it in Florida at the high school level. It was pretty well acknowledged that the South started it and that the dispute between North and South was about slavery, but we didn’t go into the specifics of how slaves were treated or anything like that. I do vaguely recall a “map” of the Underground Railroad and a lesson on Dred Scott.