Starting the New Year off right (left?)

In the spirit of a cheerful new year, here's some good news about history education in this country: beginning in 2011, Mississippi will require lessons about civil rights history in all grades, K-12. Governor Haley Barbour says, "To not know history is to repeat it. And to learn the good things about Mississippi and America and the bad things about Mississippi and America is important for every Mississippian." More here.

How Not to Write History

The Washington Post has a pretty horrifying article about the multitude of factual inaccuracies that a recent review found while looking at the U.S. history textbooks used in Virginia's public schools. These are things that any student taking a basic history test would be expected to know, like the year the U.S. entered World War I or the country to which New Orleans belonged in 1800. Scary.

The Daily Kos blog has some interesting things to say about this, noting that it's not such a surprise given that many (white) people in Virginia seem determined to rewrite history to serve their frighteningly conservative political agendas.

The 150th Anniversary of Arguing Over the Civil War

Now that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is upon us, there's been lots of talk in the news about the meaning and legacy of the Civil War. I've mentioned some good pieces on the blog already, but here's a selection:

E.J. Dionne arguing that the War was, first and foremost, about ending slavery.

A couple of great posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Historians Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts about the political significance of the ways we memorialize the war.

Arguments over the meaning of the Civil War are almost as old as the war itself. Historians call this issue "historical memory," because it has to do with how we, as a society, "remember" events from the past. These memories are always political: they have to do with who wields power in a society and how the powerful use their power. 

David Blight, a history professor at Yale, examined the late-19th century struggles over how Americans would remember the Civil War in his important book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). The book looks at the first 50 years after the war and shows how competing memories of the war resolved into one that erased emancipation and the black struggle from the dominant narrative about the meaning of the Civil War, a legacy that we are clearly still living with today.

Blight argues that during and immediately after the war, there were three ways Americans understood the conflict. One was the "emancipationist," adhered to most strongly by African-Americans and abolitionists, which saw the war as a fight to end slavery, liberate African-Americans, and ensure them a just American future. The second was the "white supremacist," which remembered the war as a valiant battle to uphold a system of white supremacy. The third was the "reconciliationist," which saw the war ultimately as a struggle between two well-meaning sides whose soldiers were each fighting a noble fight for a cause in which they believed.

Blight shows that, not surprisingly, during the war the "emancipationist" and "white supremacist" analyses dominated in the North and South, respectively. In the years following the war, as Reconstruction played out, these two memories continued to do battle. But by 1876, most whites, North and South, wanted full peace and a revival of the national economy, and they saw that the most effective way to do that was to reconcile with each other, even if it meant (and for some, especially if it meant) excluding blacks from national politics once again. Beginning at this point, then, the "reconciliationist" memory, strongly influenced by the "white supremacist memory," reigned triumphant.

This version of history highlighted the efforts on both sides to defend one's country and one's values and emphasized the mutual loss of life that had occurred in both sections of the newly reunited nation. In effect, Northern and Southern whites reconciled and rebuilt a sense of national identity by remembering the war as a struggle between two equal sides - a familial fight between brothers. They erased slavery and emancipation from this memory for the sake of national unity and a reassertion of their place on top of a racial hierarchy that protected their social, economic, and political interests. By 1915, when Blight's book ends, this had become the dominant narrative of the war - although African-Americans continued, of course, to insist upon their "emancipationist" memory.

And so here we are today. I don't want to oversimplify, because obviously a lot has happened in the past 100 years, not least the Civil Rights movement which made use of the "emancipationist" memory. But I can't help thinking about Blight's analysis when I read things like this quote from the NY Times about the "secession ball" recently held in Charleston: "'We’re not celebrating slavery,' maintained Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief Michael Givens. 'We’re looking at the bravery and tenacity of the people who rose up.'" Outside the ball, the NAACP was protesting, articulating the "emancipationist" memory for anyone who would listen.

[If you're really interested in this topic, you can watch a 52-minute lecture about it by David Blight here.]

The thin line between "campaign contributions" and corruption

This headline in the Washington Post caught my eye on Sunday: "Lawmakers seek cash during key votes."  Using data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation, a couple of journalists at the Post ran some numbers about the timing of legislative action and fundraising, concluding that, "Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws....The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers' actions."

Somehow this doesn't shock me. Apparently it surprised some members of congress and theirs staffs, like Senator Max Baucus' spokeswoman Kate Downen, who insisted to the Post that, "Money has no influence on how Senator Baucus makes his decisions."

But the thing that makes this issue clear for me is this question: would corporations be spending millions upon millions of dollars on campaign contributions if that money weren't getting them anything?

The Civil War's meaning and legacy

E.J. Dionne on the meaning and legacy of the Civil War, here.

The history and politics of race

How's that for a small topic? Ta-Nahisi Coates has been doing some fantastic writing the past few days about race, history, and politics, spurred by Haley Barbour's comments that things weren't really all that bad in Jim Crow Mississippi and white South Carolinians' insistence on celebrating secession while denying that secession had anything to do with slavery. Check it out.

The rise of the right, from Billy Graham to the Tea Party

Mother Jones has an interview with historian Darren Dochuk about his new book, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plainfolk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. The book examines migrants to California in the 1950s and 1960s, looking at the evangelical Christian communities they formed and the conservative politics that grew out of those communities, and traces right-wing politics forward to the end of the twentieth century.

In the interview, Dochuk talks about how right-wing politics since the 1960s has been largely focused on the issue of taxation. He argues that we shouldn't separate "social conservatives" from "fiscal conservatives": "In reality I think there's more continuity there than anything," he says, "and evangelical conservatives are the bridge between the two." Excessive taxation leads to big government, conservatives say, and big government intervenes in social issues in unacceptable ways.

The thing that always kills me about this is that these people were drawn to California by military jobs during and after World War II. Other historians have also written about the roots of the New Right in California in the postwar decades. Modern California was basically built with federal government dollars funneled through military bases and private contractors building things for the armed services, so these anti-taxation people who have dominated American politics for the past half-century: their livelihoods depended on big government.