Mercer University Press, 2005. The northern economy relied on manufacturing and the agricultural southern economy depended on the production of cotton. eye 967 favorite 0 comment 0 . It is alarming that 150 years after the Civil War’s end children are learning that slavery was, as one Texas board of education member put it in 2010, “a side issue.” No serious scholar agrees. And yet the argument persists, and not in small numbers. It so embedded that—as you have found—if you suggest otherwise they look at you like you’ve put your pants on your head.”. At the same time, it embarked on a spree of monument building: most of those confederate monuments you can still find in hundreds of courthouse squares in small towns across the South were put there by the local UDC chapter during the early 1900s. But it’s not always about the Stars and Bars. Later, as the veteran population aged, the UDC built homes that allowed indigent veterans and their widows to live out their days with some measure of dignity. Had that not happened, who knows how long the book would have been in use? but when he was growing up in Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s, “the lost cause was one of the main themes my grandmother used to talk about: ‘slavery was nothing to do with the Civil War—we had a cotton economy and [the North] wanted to dominate us.’ It was an undisputed topic.” At the time, he accepted this version, as children do; today, he is struck by the vigilance with which adults in his world implanted this story in the minds of their children. One postwar author was none other than Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, whose portrayal of the war sounds remarkably like the version you hear from many Southerners and political conservatives today: it was a noble but doomed effort on the part of the South to preserve self-government against federal intrusion, and it had little to do with slavery. “I asked him if he’d ever seen that [quote] and he said no—he’d never even heard of that.”, All of which explains both how that dubious assertion that thousands of slaves fought in defense of the Confederacy came to be included in that Virginia textbook back in 2010, and how the error came to light. Perhaps 1970 sounds like a long time ago, but in educational terms it’s not: 1970 was when a lot of people who are still teaching today learned what they know, and what they’ve passed on to their students. During the Civil War, at least 136 textbooks appeared in the states that made up the Confederacy, more than half of them in 1863 and 1864. A Confederate Catechism: 07. One reason boils down to simple convenience—for white people, that is. Excerpted from "The New Mind of the South". After the Civil War, southern states ultimately created a dual educational system based on race. The Southern version of history also prevailed for decades at Civil War battle sites, thanks to the fact that Congress appropriated money for the National Park Service, and Southerners in Congress had their hands on the purse strings. In an era when any assertion of “fact” is met by noisy counterassertions of competing “facts,” it’s hard to grasp how completely this warped version of history was accepted as gospel in the South, as silly to dispute as the law of gravity. That's total bs in my opinion. The Civil War was fought because of slavery and the breakup of the Union. During the Civil War, at least 136 textbooks appeared in the states that made up the Confederacy, more than half of them in 1863 and 1864. In 1866, a year after the war ended, an ex-Confederate named Edward A. Pollard published the first pro-southern history, called The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.Pollard’s book was followed by a torrent of similar propaganda. Before the 1860s most of the South had only a rudimentary public school system. Another common forum is the classroom. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. White supremacy is a toxin. For years, textbook authors have contended that economic difference between North and South was the primary cause of the Civil War. Where did the idea that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery” come from? “Amazing. 14, 2017 10:34AM ET / Published Jun. SALON ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. Nevertheless, the books on this list are, indeed, my all-time favorites — cherished works that have informed and inspired me, sometimes leaving me awestruck. It arose out of disputes over slavery and states’ rights. Yet there’s a vast chasm between this long-established scholarly consensus and the views of millions of presumably educated Americans, who hold to a theory that relegates slavery to, at best, incidental status. But an equally important reason was a vigorous, sustained effort by Southerners to literally rewrite history—and among the most ardent revisionists were a group of respectable white Southern matrons known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Take this passage from a text widely used in public high schools today, which neatly splits the difference between the “states’ rights” and the “slavery” camps: “For the South, the primary aim of the war was to win recognition as an independent nation. “No respected historian has argued for decades that the Civil War was fought over tariffs, that abolitionists were mere hypocrites, or that only constitutional concerns drove secessionists,” writes University of Virginia historian Edward Ayers. The Southern slave owners would argue that they were fighting to keep states’ rights, meaning they were dependent on a slave economy, and believed they had the right to keep their livelihood, as they knew it. Among other things, "The Truths of History" asserts that Abraham Lincoln was a mediocre intellect, that the South’s interest in expanding slavery to Western states was its benevolent desire to acquire territory for the slaves it planned to free, and that the Ku Klux Klan was a peaceful group whose only goal was maintaining public order. Discover the best U.S. Civil War History in Best Sellers. Claude Sitton, another Southerner who covered the civil rights movement for the New York Times, remembers participating in a yearly essay contest sponsored by the UDC when he was a high school student in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the early 1950s. Instead, we learned, the Southern states felt as though their rights were being encroached on by … Confederate sympathizers have long understood the importance of getting the Civil War wrong. With no space to truth-squad a 150-year-old public relations campaign, today’s texts simply strive not to offend; they don’t perpetrate the lost cause myth, but they don’t do much to correct it, either. American Civil War, four-year war (1861–65) fought between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded to form the Confederate States of America. Outside academia, the New South creed, popularized by Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady in an effort to spur economic development, also reinforced this new orthodoxy. We pause here to note that wars are complex events whose causes can never be adequately summed up in a phrase, that they can start out as one thing and evolve into another, and that what people think they are fighting for isn’t always the cause history will record. As it turns out, the textbook’s author took her information from the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ website; the error was discovered when a history professor at the College of William and Mary happened to come across it while browsing through a copy of one of her fourth grade daughter’s schoolbooks. There were more thoughtful voices, of course—in Atlanta, W. E. B. Discover the best U.S. Civil War History in Best Sellers. But the UDC’s most important and lasting contribution was in shaping the public perceptions of the war, an effort that was begun shortly after the war by a Confederate veterans’ group called the United Confederate Veterans (which later became the Sons of Confederate Veterans—also still around, and thirty thousand members strong). In a Pew study done in 2011, 48% of people surveyed believed the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” compared to only 38% who said it was fought “mainly over slavery.”. Rarely in human history has a conflict’s losing side been lent such considerable say in how the textbooks remember it. I'm not a Southerner, but I really do think it's unfair how textbooks talk about the Civil War as if the North was fighting a moral war for slavery. Among white Southerners, rich or poor, the universally accepted history was the version that would later find fame in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel "Gone With the Wind"—a book that sold millions, was translated into twenty-seven languages, and has probably had a more lasting influence on public perceptions about the South to this day than any other single work. The production of so many textbooks under difficult wartime circumstances suggests their significance in the promotion of Confederate values and ideologies. That curriculum takes place in seventh … *You will get your 1st month of Bartleby for FREE when you bundle with these textbooks where solutions are available ($9.99 if … “If [the war] had anything to do with slavery, they had no ground to stand on.”. Former New York Times correspondent John Herbers is an old man now, living in retirement in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Betty. It was this philosophy that propagated the fallacy that State’s Rights was the main cause for the Civil War. The fear of losing one’s job worked to keep most dissenters in line, but if that failed, self-appointed censors in the community were always on the lookout. The problem today, the former publishing executive told me, is that “with so many state standards, the books have become in the last ten years longer, blander, more visual, certainly—and more inclusive. The civil War started in 1861 after 11 Southern states succeeded from the Union. One longtime publishing executive told me that when he got into the business in the 1960s, it was common to see two different versions of school history textbooks—one for in the Deep South and one for everywhere else, “and the difference was how you treated the Civil War.” By the mid-twentieth century, even textbooks that did not repeat the UDC party line still tiptoed carefully through the minefield. HARVARD'S CIVIL WAR: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 2006. When antislavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president (1860), the Southern … Such scholarship was not encouraged back home: the first postwar society of Southern historians was created in 1869 for the explicit purpose of vindicating the confederate cause. The truth is just the opposite: for decades, publishers of school textbooks went out of their way not to offend delicate Southern sensibilities in their treatment of the Civil War. Yet, as Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, there was never any doubt that the billions of dollars in property represented by the South’s roughly four million slaves was somehow at the root of everything, and on this point scholars who don’t agree about much of anything else have long found common ground. I'm not a Southerner, but I really do think it's unfair how textbooks talk about the Civil War as if the North was fighting a moral war for slavery. Children took up jobs that their fathers or brothers had left vacant or those that their mothers could not manage alone as the new head of the household. Download Citation | On Jan 1, 2009, Laura Elizabeth Kopp published Teaching the Confederacy: Textbooks in the Civil War South | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate How Textbooks Can Teach Different Versions Of History : NPR Ed About 5 million public school students in Texas this year will get new and controversial textbooks … In its way, the UDC groomed a generation of Southern women for participation in the political process: presidents attended its national convocations, and its voice was heard in the corridors of the U.S. Capitol. The production of so many textbooks under difficult wartime circumstances suggests their significance in the promotion of Confederate values and ideologies. This thesis examines the Confederate textbook campaign, including the motives of authors and publishers, and analyzes the content of the textbooks themselves, including such themes as patriotism, gender roles, war, and death. In some cases, I've read these books more than once. The fight between The Northern and Southern States of America lasted until 1865. Enduring names Civil War. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. How did this happen? There’s so much to cover.” The result is like light beer: better tasting, less filling. In the 1960s, the state of Virginia authorized textbooks that were “a form of massive resistance,” according to Kevin Levin, a historian who has written books and articles on the Civil War … From "The New Mind of the South" by Tracy Thompson. NO GREATER GLORY is an epic Civil War historical romance on par with GWTW or North & South. How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history The United Daughters of the Confederacy altered the South’s memory of the Civil War.
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