Take it away, Shep –
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said-
So, this fact is obviously not news to Ethan S. Rafuse – military historian – but since you mention cotton,
Look, I’m sure this is probably the stuff of tons of scholarly debate that simply doesn’t rise to my level of experience, but point me to it, because I would very much like to add to it.
I could, in but a few hours, add thousands of words and hundreds of footnotes on why this was
the stupidest decision ever in the history of warfare.
And that statement contains only the thinnest shred of hyperbole, despite my reputation.
Even in the realm of the tightest Secondary Order Effect [SOE] it has little payoff for what should have been seen as an unacceptable risk.
No serious scholar argues this.
In trying and starve the globe of cotton in the hopes that it would come begging, the South also bankrupted itself.
But of course, the worst and most foreseeable risk was that the world might discover that it could survive just fine without slave-picked cotton.
As it did.
Meanwhile, you’ve bankrupted yourself for the promise of a payday that will never materialize.
Now what?
I have become a certified MOOC freak. There are several different platforms for MOOCS – Massive Open Online Courses – such as edX and Coursera, and happily many others are available on YouTube. (Many are available through those platforms as well as on YouTube.)
I prefer the edX platform if I use one. I have never gotten a certificate or worried about that at all, so I ride free, just for the joy of cramming my ever-curious mind.
What’s so amazing is that anyone at all can, for free, peek in at some of the most elite and incredible classes being taught today.
Harvard’s most popular course, “Justice,” for instance, taught by Professor Michael Sandel, is a class everyone should at least check out. I am big on “archived” courses, because they are always “self-paced,” but Justice actually just began again for real, so check it out.
Here’s the little course intro video and text below:
Taught by lauded Harvard professor Michael Sandel, Justice explores critical analysis of classical and contemporary theories of justice, including discussion of present-day applications. Topics include affirmative action, income distribution, same-sex marriage, the role of markets, debates about rights (human rights and property rights), arguments for and against equality, dilemmas of loyalty in public and private life. The course invites learners to subject their own views on these controversies to critical examination.
The principal readings for the course are texts by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls. Other assigned readings include writings by contemporary philosophers, court cases, and articles about political controversies that raise philosophical questions.
Other favorites of mine are Boston University’s War for the Greater Middle East taught by the amazing Andrew Bacevich – archived now at edX – and all three of the foremost Lincoln/Civil War Historian’s – (Dr. Eric Foner’s) – courses on Civil War and Reconstruction from Columbia University.
“Hidden Figures” has given us all a glimpse into all the history we’re lacking, and I don’t think every scholar in America put together could make the point better than Leslie Jones does in this short clip.
Leslie Jones on SNL gave me more Black History on Weekend Update than I’ve had heretofore. And I’m pretty damn historically literate. And Weekend Update is pretty short and she only came in at the end.
Everyone should read Lies My Teacher Told Me, which emphasizes a vast amount of the lies, slights, and outright omissions fed to us through our history textbooks.
But one area Lies misses, probably in large part because the subject matter is so shamefully difficult to find in the first place, is the place in our history made possible by minorities. It is criminal that our Congress can’t manage to even bring to a vote a Sense of the Congress – a non-binding declaration with no force of law or any power whatsoever – resolution condemning slavery in the US, let alone apologizing for it.
As Columbia Professor Dr. Eric Foner, considered the foremost Abraham Lincoln scholar by most, so beautifully points out in (one of his three & I cannot remember which) Civil War and Reconstruction class, Americans would find it terribly odd to find an American Slavery Memorial or United States of America Slavery Museum in Germany, especially if they didn’t have a Holocaust Memorial.
Right?
That brings it home, does it not?
How do we manage to act so high and mighty, fellow citizens, when we ignore this part of our history? The fact that so many US citizens deny that racism even exists, let alone dare to acknowledge the fact – and it is a fact – that slaves built this country, is staggering to me. And yes, slaves did build this country. They built it with sweat, blood and with tears.
Here’s another fact, a single, simple fact, that unlike the fact above – a complicated fact drawn from a complex equation of many sources – is wholly undeniable and inarguable.
Yup, white people who whine constantly that racism doesn’t exist, or worse, the only racism is “reverse racism!!!”
So, now, I’ll leave my rant and deliver the promised funny version, where I learned & laughed. Thank you, Leslie Jones.
*It disgusts me to write “slave property” and I simply could not bring myself to use the census terminology and the term that was once completely commonplace, “property in slaves.” That was once a thing. A term no one really paid attention to, not even the most ardent Abolitionist, because it was just part of the lexicon. It was a true description of something so repulsive that anyone with even a stitch of humanity recoils at it. I apologize for using the term “slave property” as well, but to make the point I had to link the two words one way or another, because they were, in fact, human beings that were quantifiable in the same way a car is now.
