General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why do we buy into the worship of the military? [View all]ancianita
(36,023 posts)of us were taught that version of HIS story.
( In 1962 I was taught that by Mr. Boozer, my 8th grade Honors American History teacher, and a Southerner. He knew better. We students argued against him then, because he was wrong, and archived records have since smashed that "cover" argument.
Now, the reason France and England aided the South were economic, yes -- because they wanted central banks to run the U.S. monetary system, while Lincoln didn't. However, their reasons were not part of U.S. history, or told to most Southerners until, over the last 50 years, it's been revealed that "Second Bank of The United States" -- re-established later in 1919 as "The Fed," had been set up as a corporation by European central banks, and was not, in fact, a department of the U.S. government. Lincoln wanted the U.S. to supply its own currency; the South wanted European banks to supply their currency. )
Two historical revisions -- both by Jill Lepore, considered a 1st tier historian -- re-align the original politics of the Southern Confederacy with the reality of U.S. History. One is These Truths -- A History of the United States (2018), and This America (2019). The "story" of America has not been centered on the evidentiary fact of slavery and racism.
Another good history to read along slavery and racism lines is Carrie Gibson's El Norte-- The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (2019) which recovers the true history of Hispanic North Americans' relationship to white expropriation of their land base and even culture.
from These Truths...
The ideas behind the Constitution "rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races," Stephens said, but "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery...is his natural and moral condition.
This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.
The real fairy tales are the ones we've been mistaught through historical framings done by U.S. historians like Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, George Bancroft and Frederick Jackson Turner. History and journalism weren't established as professions until 1889, with more limited systems of research and reporting that than exist now, also more framed by and for the "great man" and "great idea" biases that are now challenged "stories."