Thanks, heebie! I guess I was primarily curious about two things: 1) for those of you with a connection to UVA, how is this playing among the alums?
and 2) for those of you whose universities are not nearly so progressive (:::cough mine among them cough:::), does this give you any ideas?
I lived in a dorm named for Willa Cather. I think that counts for something.
Yale has been ignoring student petitions to rename Calhoun College (dorm) since about 1970. They may name a new dorm after the first African-American to graduate, but that won't really solve the problem. Also, the alums killed in action on both sides of the civil war get equal billing on the campus memorial, while neither revolutionary war royalists nor the few nazi alums get any recognition.
4: New College Oxford has a small memorial to those members of the College who were killed in action while fighting for their country during the First World War, the country in question being Germany. Always struck me as a very civilised gesture.
1.2: Mine has a Native American mascot. I'm not holding my breath for anything that looks even slightly enlightened.
My grandfather donated some land to build a library in the town where he grew up in Maryland (it was among the last parcels from the original colonial family land grant). They named the library after my great great grandfather, a former mayor of the town and also a confederate officer. They recently decided to remove his name from the library, in part because they built a new building and in part because, you know, confederate officer and the town is majority African-American. There was an unsuccessful campaign to keep my ancestor's name on the new building and my aunt briefly mooted the idea of the family weighing in favorably. I don't think anybody did, in the end, but if they had I was tempted to write a letter on the other side, strongly encouraging the town to ditch the name.
I'm sure I can find other threads to post it in. Long story short, buy cialis.
Well, it doesn't take that much land to build a library. But you'd think they could find an ancestor with a similar name but who died before the Civil War started or was born after it ended.
while neither revolutionary war royalists nor the few nazi alums get any recognition
Oh man, this could make a great petition. Unimaginative, are you an alum? Email me at the pseud link if you know anything about more about our royalists/Nazis.
Ok, so which one of you is Brooks Mather Kelley?
I didn't have the SAT scores for it.
The petition should totally be to rename Calhoun after one of the Nazis.
I suppose they could go with a Bush.
for those of you with a connection to UVA, how is this playing among the alums?
It's the first I've heard of the dorm, specifically, but I'm aware of ongoing efforts to fill in the history of slaves and slavery at the university. Monticello is similar. They're much more up-front now compared to, say, ten or twenty years ago, when it comes to the slavery thing and the Sally Hemings thing.
20: I've only watched a few minutes, but that's excellent.
12: sorry, my knowledge of royalists probably came from a muddy recollection of the link in 13. The story of a midlevel nazi martyr or two who had studied at Yale as foreign students may also have been in the alumni magazine or something similar, but googling Yale nazis points only to Prescott Bush and Paul deMan, both of whom survived the war.
There's a growing movement locally to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee astride a horse. The statue sits in a prominent downtown park. I think it'd be swell to leave it right there and surround it with placards explaining the history of putting up monuments to people who shot at US troops, but I'm not sure that's an option currently on the table.
You could turn the park into a shooting range.
That seems unwise; it's a pretty small park. Maybe half a soccer pitch, to use metric units.
Well, you'd have to put up walls and so forth.
Last tine I went past the statue of Lenin that got moved to Fremont (Seattle), its hands were enamelled red and I thinkbit had been annotated in Sharpie with a summary of his crimes. Seemed fair.
Oh, well, if he brought industry!
Andrew Jackson's plantation museum is a lot more sensible of the wrongs of slavery than I expected, but still shockingly blithe about breaking the Indian treaties. Who can imagine what it would have been like otherwise? some signage asks. Well, I can begin: different people rich, and maybe more slowly, but maybe no Dust Bowl and fewer extinctions.
(I do wonder how European history would differ. Was the population removal politically determinative?)
Andrew Jackson's plantation museum is a lot more sensible of the wrongs of slavery than I expected, but still shockingly blithe about breaking the Indian treaties.
Well, not a whole lot of Indians left in Tennessee these days.
I do wonder how European history would differ. Was the population removal politically determinative?
That's an interesting question, especially with regard to the Five Civilized Tribes, who were sufficiently assimilated by the 1830s that it's not clear they would have acted differently from the white planters who replaced them. Many of their descendants in Indian Territory sided with the Confederacy, so. On the other hand, where would those white planters have ended up, and what would they have done?
If only we had some historians around here.
If Morton Frewen had had to stay home - I don't know, though comedy sound-effects of collapse come to mind. I was thinking of steerage-class population movement, though. Would the 1848 revolutions have had more traction?
Ah, I was thinking more of the intensification of plantation agriculture for export to Europe. Yours is an interesting question too.
Not just the historians but the rest of the Anglosphere should be huffing at us by now.
My feeling is that it's generous and good to recognize the dead from the other side on wars where they were in the right (Vietnam) or neither side was clearly in the right (Revolution, WW1), but I'm against it when the other side was evil (Nazis, Confederates, 9/11 bombers, etc.).
If you've got one side that's freeing black slaves and arming them to defend their new status, and another that's trying to recapture them and return them to the plantations, it's pretty obvious which one's evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Regiment
35: I dunno, man. A lot of people fought on the rebel side in the Revolution for reasons very similar to the reasons their descendants fought on the rebel side in the Civil War, and on the flip side many of the soldiers who fought on the Axis side in WWII were conscripts who didn't have any particular allegiance to their countries' ruling ideologies. "Good v. Evil" doesn't seem like a very good framework for evaluating this to me.
I would definitely kick in a bit of money if anyone wanted to kickstart a biopic of Colonel Tye.
pwned by ajay, I guess, but I managed to work in a pro-Nazi angle as well.
6: From childhood walking holidays in Wasdale I remembered a war memorial in a bus shelter commemorating both Allies and Axis forces. Looking it up, it turns out I got it wrong, as it's actually more general (at least in terms of conflicts / participants) - the 'Men of All Nations' memorial.
https://www.warmemorialsonline.org.uk/node/170239
I didn't say countries shouldn't honor their own dead in wars where they were in the wrong. So it doesn't much matter for my point whether the rebel side was wrong or merely that the loyalists weren't wrong in the revolution.
38: That drunk Cylon fuck? Screw him.
I DIDN'T SERVE IN A WAR AND A REBELLION AND LOSE MY FRAKKING EYE TO HAVE MY NAME SOUNDSPELLED BY AN ECLECTIC INTERNET MAGAZINE!