The solution to a poor understanding of history is always more history. And the willingness to admit to being wrong.I really wish Zinn had pushed through, instead of simply posing questions. I wish he had made a case for Lincoln responding in some other way, after the Confederacy launched a war with the explicit aim of raising an empire that would protect and expand slavery. I really wish he'd taken a hard up the Haitian Revolution, which did not have a bloody "civil" war--but suffered a bloody war, nonetheless. I wish he'd tried to explain why these other places did not have Civil War, instead of retreating to the notion that we somehow just chose it.I wish he would have tackled Lincoln's long record of advocating for paid emancipation as well as colonization, and the sordid results of those efforts. I wish he'd looked at the history of paid emancipation efforts in the South, and grappled with their repeated failure. I wish he'd tried to explain why, if Lincoln couldn't get Delaware to peacefully give up slavery in 1863, why he would have been able to convince South Carolina in 1860. I wish he'd grapple with the ethical dilemma of telling someone like Frederick Douglass that four million blacks should continue to live in a state of perpetual violence, in hopes of forestalling violence for the rest of the country.
I am not being sarcastic here. There may well be a case. But too often I find that this argument is based in high-minded generalizations, and not in the tiny, hard facts of history. The history of emancipation attempts in Delaware and the South never come up. No one looks at how Sojourner Truth's son was sold into slavery in Alabama, after New York went with gradual emancipation. Instead we just get "war is bad." But some of us were already at war.
13.1.12
This blog really needs to have a label for "Go read Ta-Nahisi Coates." Because, seriously:
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