- Before it was called the Civil War, it was called the Slaveholders’ Rebellion, until apologists got the name changed;
- Trump and rewriting American history;
- Perhaps knowing less makes you happier;
- Religious folks who see data centers as signs of the apocalypse;
- Trump insists his polling number are high, even as they hit a new low;
- More about the Texas reading list.
I saw comments today about how Homer’s Odyssey was, of course, tinkered with by the later Greeks, then by the Romans, and so on, as stories always are altered to suit the thematic needs of later cultures who repeat those stories. So Christopher Nolan’s foregrounding the idea of Zeus’ law isn’t so unusual.
Running theme: history is stories, and stories always change, accidentally or deliberately.
NY Times, guest essay by Anthony Conwright, yesterday: It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
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