America Aflame

I guess it's been a week for promoting Friends of dcat. May as well continue the friend trend. David Goldfield, my MA advisor, who also sat on my dissertation committee and for a while was the series editor for my book until the press got a serious case of Dipshit-itis, got a great review for his latest book from this week's New York Times Book Review.

When I was in Charlotte a couple of years ago we visited for a while and he told me that his next book was going to be about how "the Civil War was not worth the cost." Naturally my jaw dropped. My thoughts then (and now had he fully written that book as opposed to the much subtler work that appears to have emerged) were not only that he was crazy and wrong, but that he was crazy and wrong in a way destined to ruin his reputation in many circles in the profession. But it appears that what did emerge is a fine example of counterfactual and speculative history, among other things.

Tired Feet, Rested Souls and Empty Pockets

On Thursday afternoon from 3:00 to 4:00 in the Rare Book Room of Duke University's Perkins Library I will be giving a talk, “Tired Feet, Rested Souls and Empty Pockets: Bus Boycotts and the Politics of Race in the U.S. and South Africa,” which will be sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. If you are going to be anywhere near the Triangle Area I hope you will swing by.

The Civil War Was About Slavery

In my research for Freedom's Main Line and for another project on which I am currently working I have come across a great deal of material on the centennial commemorations of the Civil War. But in the South during that era, the era of massive resistance to civil rights and heightened regional sensitivities (and thus whistling past the graveyard chauvinism) they were less commemorations that celebrations.

We are fast approaching the 150th anniversary. And while much has changed much remains the same. (Yes, it is confusing that the Times uses the same photo for two different stories.)

Look, the Civil War was about slavery. The South fought the Civil War to preserve slavery and we know this because the states told us as much in the secession documents and in their conversations with one another. Sure, they had other complaints with the North, but none would have risen to a level anything beyond harsh words had the South's oligarchs not been insistent on maintaining their peculiar institution.

This is a message we need to pound down peoples' throats as the sesquicentennial approaches because there will be a serious rearguard attempt to revive States' Rights arguments about the war. the rejoinder to the assertion of States' Rights is always: The States' Rights to do what?