“The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.”
Who said it?
Yep, that ol’ unreconstructed Neo-Confederate, Karl Marx himself!
That and many other period quotes are in Ian C. Martin’s The Quotable American Civil War.
Do we have Confederate cars? Very interesting article on the “Little Eight” and the rise of car manufacturing in the South. I drive a Honda Odyssey made in Alabama and it’s the best car I’ve ever owned (which, I should say, might make up for my ’73 Honda Civic, which was by far and away the worst car I’ve ever owned). Alabama produced no cars in 1995, last year it produced over 800,000. The Civil War continues in the automotive field, with the Southerners unenthusiastic about bailing out Yankee car companies.
The Southerners seem to have chosen an especially precipitous time to pick their fight with the Detroit Yankees: Without the money, General Motors and Chrysler have warned that they might be forced to file for bankruptcy protection. Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California-Berkeley, says a Detroit meltdown, on the eve of Christmas and in the midst of the worst job market in modern memory, “would be a devastating anti-stimulus package.”
The anti-bailout lawmakers are all Republicans possessed of a deep-seated antipathy to organized labor, and angry at the way the government has bungled the financial bailout. But they and many of their counterparts in the Senate have become experts on the labor practices of foreign manufacturers because they’ve seen them up close. The tussle over the bailout has evinced what at first blush may seem a new kind of provincialism that pits Democrats and a few Republicans (like Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio) from heavy union and Big Three states against Republicans from right-to-work states in the old Confederacy. While McConnell & Co. oppose federal subsidies for the Big Three at the federal level, the states from which they hail have generously extended billions of dollars in subsidies to foreign automakers.
But there’s a deeper cleavage at work here. Today’s Southern solons have watched their local economies blossom thanks to a younger, more-vibrant auto industry unencumbered by the Big Three’s legacy costs and union work rules-a sort of anti-Detroit that has the flexibility and ability to turn profits by making the types of cars that Americans actually want to buy.
And another article by Andrew Ferguson on why “The Past Isn’t What It Used To Be.” Although Ferguson deals mainly with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, his criticisms ring true for a lot of places I’ve been to lately, and affects Civil War historiography as well.
by the time the museum opened, a decade later, it was a museum of social history, “history from the bottom up.” The new historians were more interested in broad concepts than in discrete events, in the vast movements of peoples rather than the doings of statesmen, reformers, explorers, diplomats, and generals. They found more relevance in econometric models and statistical tables than in treaties or constitutions. They also, as you’ll notice from the quotation above, began putting ironic quote marks around phrases like the “American way of life.”
Social history dug up mother lodes of valuable material, and enriched the historical understanding of anyone who bothered to pay attention. Yet instead of supplementing traditional narrative history with fresh information, social history supplanted it altogether, driving traditional historians from their usual professional perches in the universities and museums.
For the public, the consequences were profound. Quite apart from its merits as a historical method, social history had an undeniable defect: It was deeply boring. This was made especially clear when it was pressed into service as a working philosophy for museum curators, who found license to discount artifacts and displays tied to individual historical personages in favor of homely artifacts of everyday life, arranged under broad abstractions like “Time” or “Difference” or “Community.” Chronology in particular was dismissed as a contrivance–a “coercive category,” as one new historian famously explained, “that by its normative inclusive character denies its own fictionality and instability and thereby distorts the creative possibilities of the present and future.”
These historians were heavily influenced by the Marxist and radical political currents of the sixties, but also by the French Annales school, which emphasized the longue duree and discounted discrete events, even major wars and battles, as more or less irrelevant to the long march of social history. Political and military history, the mainstay of the traditional historian, was of decidedly secondary importance. And as Ferguson says, it was boooring.
The other major problem he notes is that even though the emphasis is now supposedly on the common man, too many museums now reflect the tastes and politics of the curators and their intellectual soulmates, not those of the people who go there, and there’s a marked tendency to shake a bony finger at the commoners for their lack of political awareness. One sees this with Civil War historiography as well, with too many new historical works being written by academics and intellectuals for their peers and not for any sort of general audience. As I’ve noted before, much of the best and most readable work is being done by outsiders i.e. people who are not professional historians.
I haven’t seen the new Visitor’s Center at Gettysburg, but from the sound of things something of the sort is going on there as well. Outside influence was what it ultimately took to shake up the Smithsonian, and that may well be the case with the Civil War.
Read it see what you think.
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