Popular Post SoundAndMotion Posted June 24, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted June 24, 2018 5 hours ago, gmgraves said: Yes, it has occurred to me, but since there was no real agenda in those days, and since they mirrored what people who were there said, I figure that the chances of them being wrong was much less than the later books which were being written at a time when a great injustice was being rectified. Also, the further one gets, in time, from an event or series of events the greater the chance that details will be wrong. Watching documentaries on Discovery and Science channel about subjects I know about, I hear egregious errors all the time. Makes me want to yell at the TV! You may want to consider your sources. TV, “pre-civil-rights elementary school history books” and “elderly people I knew as a child who were born in the 1860s and 1870's and were alive during Reconstruction” are one way to go. Carefully and skeptically-chosen books written for adults are another. The distance in time from an event is important, but even events from last week are reported differently by different people. There is a vast trove of documentary evidence from that time to allow even modern historians to try(!) to piece together the truth. The “real agenda in those days” probably included saving face and avoiding shame. Very much like Germany after WWII. Your account of Jim Crow reminds me of what I learned from my father and paternal relatives about Germany at that time. Interestingly, it matched what I learned in elementary through high school in the US. Germany was after all our good friend in the 60’s and 70’s. “The Holocaust was planned by a few evil men at the top and carried out by culturally-obedient Germans just following orders. The average German knew Hitler was anti-Semitic, but since he fixed the broken economy and got rid of the high unemployment, they ignored all the unpleasant rumors (fake news).” My relationship with my father never recovered from our arguments about my reading Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners in 1997 (a book). About your textbooks matching the verbal accounts: keep in mind there is no objective “Central Agency for the Teaching of History” in the US. Your textbooks were chosen from a variety of options bought by your local school board and may well have matched what they wanted history to be. christopher3393, look&listen and Jud 2 1 Link to comment
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