Manstein wrote:

Platuan4th wrote:

Ahtman wrote: There is little similarity between The American Civil War and The War of Northern Aggression, and only one of those is taught in one specific geographic region.

And where would that be? I schooled in both Louisiana and Mississippi and have only ever heard it referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression" outside of academic areas.

Then again, I went to private schools.

I grew up in Louisiana as well and went to public school. Never heard it called the War of Northern Aggression outside of books or intellectual discussions.

Ahtman wrote:

WarOne wrote:America Revolutionary War
American War of independence
American Revolution
Revolutionary War

Each of those is extremely similar, are interchangeable, and used in all classrooms teaching the subject. There is little similarity between The American Civil War and The War of Northern Aggression, and only one of those is taught in one specific geographic region.

WarOne wrote:
I agree that each term is interchangeable. However, there is a significant difference in the terms that use either Revolutionary War, and War of Independence. Assigning general reasons for war, Revolution and Indpendence carry signficantly different definitions. They both emphasis change in some form, but with cultural and political spin, either one could become a negative connotation in the society that uses either term.

Manstein wrote:The article is silly because it attempts to saddle racism on the South.

Kilkrazy wrote:I'm not convinced by 5.

halonachos wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:I'm not convinced by 5.

The south was facing an economic collapse before seeing as though they were an export economy, mainly exporting agricultural goods. However, a man by the name of Eli Whitney introduced the Cotton Gin to the south and caused an economic boom thanks to increased production of sorted cotton. This cotton was traded mostly to the English who had a large textiles industry. During the Civil War the English wanted the South to remain as intact as possible and favored the South during the war. They equipped the South with ships and weapons and it wasn't until the battle of Antietem that Abraham Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation which made the war officially about slavery. Seeing as though the English were officially against slavery they stopped overt support of the South, which helped damn the southern war effort.

The South lost a great part of their workforce and land after the war which is why Lincoln wanted to help rebuild the South afterwards(see Reconstruction).

The South could've kept going and going economically as long as the British were buying and boy were they buying.

Melissia wrote:What, you think that a country other than the U.S.A. can't be inherently self-contradictory in its foreign policy?

Melissia wrote:"Inherently" in this case meaning something like "in the nature of something though not readily apparent" (Priceton)-- even if you assume that our only desire in foreign policy is to propagate our own self-interest (hardly an uncommon belief outside of the US), even THAT in and of itself inherently contradictory because we as a nation have conflicting self-interests.

Manstein wrote:Many historians would argue that the British were on the verge of throwing total support to the Confederacy. By 1963 G.B. had already sent an army to Canada just in case and were simply waiting for a decisive Confederate victory before throwing their hats into the ring.

Manstein wrote:Many historians would argue that the British were on the verge of throwing total support to the Confederacy. By 1963 G.B. had already sent an army to Canada just in case and were simply waiting for a decisive Confederate victory before throwing their hats into the ring.

Polonius wrote:I think one of the reasons there's so much argument about the role of slavery is that for most people, it's intertwined with racism.

Melissia wrote:What, you think that a country other than the U.S.A. can't be inherently self-contradictory in its foreign policy?

Kilkrazy wrote:

Melissia wrote:What, you think that a country other than the U.S.A. can't be inherently self-contradictory in its foreign policy?

No, I'm saying that it wasn't.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
The reason Lincoln made the Proclamation of Emancipation after Gettysburg was that by its clear abolitionist stance it convinced the UK not to recognise the south.

All that stuff about the UK preparing to invade the north from Canada is BS.

So is the stuff about the UK selling weapons to the south. UK manufacturers sold weapons to both sides, as allowed by international law.

David W. Blight joined the department in January 2003 as professor of history. He is one of the nation's foremost authorities on the US Civil War and its legacy. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. During the 2006-07 academic year he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library.

Blight is the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007). This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives. Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. Other published works include a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989). Blight is the editor of and author of six books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Bedford Books, 1993); co-editor with Robert Gooding-Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Bedford Books, 1997); co-editor with Brooks Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (Kent State Univ. Press, 1997); and Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (orig. 1797, NYU Press, 1997), the book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth. The edited volume, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, was published by Smithsonian Press in 2004 and is the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

Blight is also a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers, and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation (Houghton Mifflin). He is also series advisor and editor for the Bedford Books series in American History and Culture, a popular series of teaching books for the college level. Blight lectures widely on Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service, devoting a good deal of time to these and many other public history initiatives.

Blight has also been a consultant to several documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America," and "The Reconstruction Era" (2004). Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. He has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan. He was also senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Munich in Germany in 1992-93.

Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002. Since 2004 he has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the New York Historical Society and the board for African American Programs at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves on the board of advisors to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is involved in planning numerous conferences and events to commemorate both the Lincoln anniversary and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition.

Professor Blight previously taught at Amherst College for 13 years. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin- Madison and then taught at Harvard and at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Before his university career, he taught for seven years in a public high school in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. His courses include seminars in nineteenth-century U.S. history, African- American history, and historical memory.