The South

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PB+J
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Re: The South

Post by PB+J »

chas wrote:
PB+J wrote:This point is often overlooked: the North had the state's rights argument. By 1840 all the Northern states had abolished slavery. In the Dred Scott case, 1857, the Supreme Court dominated by slaveholders nullified those bans. To simplify, a slaveowner who served in the Army moved to two different free states, bringing Dred Scott, a slave, with him. Scott sued, arguing that he could not be a slave in a state which had banned slavery. The Court ruled that a slaveowner could bring his slaves into a free state and they would remains slaves, thus nullifying that States' decision to abolish slavery. The Court asserted that northern states had no right to legislate on the question of slavery or on the rights of African Americans. It's a complete negation of the right of Northern states to abolish slavery.
I can find no evidence that Maryland, Missouri, or Kentucky abolished slavery before it was re-instituted.

I've always found it ironic that Maryland calls itself the Free State even though it didn't abolish slavery till late in the Civil War.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here? Maryland is below the mason dixon line and was always considered a southern state. Missouri was admitted specifically as a slave state in the Missouri compromise. KT was always a slave state

Dred Scott lived in Wisconsin and Iowa, both free states and the basis of his claim that his enslavement ended when he resided in a state which had abolished slavery.
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chas
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Re: The South

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PB+J wrote:
chas wrote:
PB+J wrote:This point is often overlooked: the North had the state's rights argument. By 1840 all the Northern states had abolished slavery. In the Dred Scott case, 1857, the Supreme Court dominated by slaveholders nullified those bans. To simplify, a slaveowner who served in the Army moved to two different free states, bringing Dred Scott, a slave, with him. Scott sued, arguing that he could not be a slave in a state which had banned slavery. The Court ruled that a slaveowner could bring his slaves into a free state and they would remains slaves, thus nullifying that States' decision to abolish slavery. The Court asserted that northern states had no right to legislate on the question of slavery or on the rights of African Americans. It's a complete negation of the right of Northern states to abolish slavery.
I can find no evidence that Maryland, Missouri, or Kentucky abolished slavery before it was re-instituted.

I've always found it ironic that Maryland calls itself the Free State even though it didn't abolish slavery till late in the Civil War.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here? Maryland is below the mason dixon line and was always considered a southern state. Missouri was admitted specifically as a slave state in the Missouri compromise. KT was always a slave state

Dred Scott lived in Wisconsin and Iowa, both free states and the basis of his claim that his enslavement ended when he resided in a state which had abolished slavery.
I guess we just use different lingo. I made the mistake of referring to Maryland as a southern state when I lived in Virginia. It's definitely not the prevailing opinion among native Virginians, at least not those that I know. I've lived in Maryland for 30 years and never heard a native Marylander refer to it as the south, and have heard quite a few deny that it's a southern state.
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Re: The South

Post by PB+J »

Mason Dixon line is the southern border of PA. MD had slavery during the war, and never voluntarily abolished it. People in southern VA don't feel that northern VA, where I live, is really the South. I'm happy to agree!

Johnny Cash, "Hey Porter"

Hey, Porter
Hey Porter
Would you tell me the time?
How much longer will it be
'Til we cross that Mason Dixon Line?
At daylight would you tell that engineer to slow it down
Or better still, just stop the train
'Cause I want to look around

Hey, Porter
Hey, Porter
What time did you say?
How much longer will it be
'Til I can see the light of day?
When we hit Dixie will you tell that engineer to ring his bell
And ask everybody that ain't asleep to stand right up and yell
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chas
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Re: The South

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PB+J wrote:Mason Dixon line is the southern border of PA. MD had slavery during the war, and never voluntarily abolished it. People in southern VA don't feel that northern VA, where I live, is really the South. I'm happy to agree!
I'm with you that rural VA is a different world from NoVa. The thing that I find bizarre is the people who say NoVa is a different world from suburban Maryland. My father in law, who lives in Mathews County, wouldn't draw a distinction between Arlington and Bethesda.

Thanks for the Johnny Cash! IIRC that was his first single, recorded at Sun Records around the same time as Elvis cut That's Alright Mama.
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Re: The South

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PB+J wrote:Northerners often had little or no sympathy for African Americans but they were deeply concerned about what they called "the slave power," which they saw as a sinister conspiracy to control their own governments.

Politics and power. Most wars come down to that, don't they?
PB+J wrote:An 18 year old often has no idea why he does what he does--one of my students, a colonel in the US army, said "it's always the same story: they join up thinking it's going to be cool and then they're stuck."
That or they are conscripted, another version of slavery. But with the same result. Conscripts don't know why they are there either.

Who would have guessed the Civil War would be a hot topic for the Poststructural Pub? What's next? The Kennedy assassination? :lol:
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Re: The South

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swizzlestick wrote:Who would have guessed the Civil War would be a hot topic for the Poststructural Pub?
Considering the Pub's prior leanings toward bubble wrap and Lolcats, I can see your point. But in its way, fluidity is poststructural, isn't it? And now here we are at the Pub: Come for the craic - stay for the education.
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Re: The South

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And we are all dancing around so delicately so as not to become political, just politely informative.

I was discussing the re-naming of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton (which makes ultimate sense to me as a tiny bit of a history buff.) But my friend was clueless as to the reasoning There are so many things we don't know about our own history. The education we receive in child and young adulthood is so cursory.

My son, in the third grade, wrote a report on Christopher Columbus. The internet was shiny and new and details beyond those thin childhood books were at his fingertips. His teacher was stunned and a little bit startled with the details presented. My son and I discussed it as he went along diluting some of the details, but keeping the theme truthful. We ended pondering all sorts of nuances such as how to present atrocities without traumatizing his classmates. It was interesting to be considering what facts were "age appropriate" to share with the rest of the ten year olds in the class with a ten year old who had already absorbed the information. My son has always been a pragmatist and a history buff and he didn't see a reason to hold back facts that were clearly presented to him from reliable sources. It was an interesting couple of years for teachers as kids were going beyond the encyclopedia on the shelves and those thin childhood history books on the juvenile shelves. And now we get the added complication of sifting through the sources to search for facts, always searching for biases if we wish to be informed.
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Re: The South

Post by Nanohedron »

busterbill wrote:There are so many things we don't know about our own history.
When I look back on the history I was taught all the way until college, and some of it college history too, I know now that I was presented with a largely bowdlerized mythos. I suppose the stock rationale would be that you can't fit everything into a school year, and that may be, but now we find ourselves in the interesting position of no longer being able to rest upon the traditional narratives anymore. People are after the untaught truth more than ever before, and that means change. These are uncharted waters.

Circumstances of late might never have happened without the Internet, but while some of us may have reason to give thanks for that, let us also ever remember that the technology presents a two-edged sword. All you have to do is shop online to figure that out.
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swizzlestick
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Re: The South

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Nanohedron wrote: largely bowdlerized mythos.
So true. And we can't blame students if they find this sanitized pablum so boring or forgettable.
All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out. -- Mark Twain
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Re: The South

Post by Nanohedron »

swizzlestick wrote:
Nanohedron wrote: largely bowdlerized mythos.
So true. And we can't blame students if they find this sanitized pablum so boring or forgettable.
I hadn't considered that, but now that you mention it, it would explain a lot.
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Re: The South

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Payday, Piping, Percussion and Poetry- the 4 best Ps
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chas
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Re: The South

Post by chas »

Relevant to the recent posts including David's: Last week I was discussing with a co-worker that neither of us had learned about Juneteenth in school. (He grew up in Virginia, I in Connecticut.) I pointed out to him that I've probably learned more about history from ballads and historical novels than I ever did in school.
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PB+J
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Re: The South

Post by PB+J »

My State, Virginia, has a test called the "Standards of learning" or SOL, that all students have to take every year. Virginia history and US history both have SOL tests in certain years.

I've never been able to help my kids with these tests at all, mostly because as you might expect they are a mish mash of pandering. There are questioned obviously designed for the sensibilities of conservatives, and other obviously designed fro the sensibilities of liberals. There are question that are only in there because some state legislator wanted his district represented. They aren't well chosen fact--they don't contribute to any larger narrative, they're just kind of random. Who enjoys memorizing random facts? I would look at one of the study questions, and none of the answers were plausibly right to me, or sometimes you could tell which one was supposed to be right but I felt that answer was wrong--felt it because I'd done research on the topic and knew it was wrong.

An alternative would be a strong historical narrative, but then you are irritating someone politically, because your strong narrative is leaving someone out. Most of us try to adopt an approach that focuses on learning to read "primary sources," documents from the time period being studied. I often focus on episodic "problems" that have themes that recur--for example, Jackson and the Indians in 1830s raises problems that appear again in the 1870s and in 1900 and then overseas. It's not easy to teach: it's actually a form of "doing" rather than just the thing that people do when they "can't do."
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Re: The South

Post by swizzlestick »

PB+J wrote:An alternative would be a strong historical narrative, but then you are irritating someone politically, because your strong narrative is leaving someone out. Most of us try to adopt an approach that focuses on learning to read "primary sources," documents from the time period being studied. I often focus on episodic "problems" that have themes that recur--for example, Jackson and the Indians in 1830s raises problems that appear again in the 1870s and in 1900 and then overseas. It's not easy to teach: it's actually a form of "doing" rather than just the thing that people do when they "can't do."
Wish I had a history teacher like you in high school. It took years to overcome my distaste for the subject.

And thanks for recommending Confederate Reckoning. Looking into getting a copy.
All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out. -- Mark Twain
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Re: The South

Post by Nanohedron »

PB+J wrote:It's not easy to teach: it's actually a form of "doing" rather than just the thing that people do when they "can't do."
Yep.
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