Another Civil War Memory posting from which I learned a lot and for which I'm grateful.
The overall story calls to mind, for me anyway, the work that Monticello belatedly but blessedly began some years ago--the work of making the huge Black majority of Monticello's 18th century residents a big part of THAT overall story.
Another Civil War Memory posting from which I learned a lot and for which I'm grateful.
The overall story calls to mind, for me anyway, the work that Monticello belatedly but blessedly began some years ago--the work of making the huge Black majority of Monticello's 18th century residents a big part of THAT overall story.
And I was glad to learn of the new statue in Franklin honoring Black United States Civil War soldiers. Talk about something from slavery that seems to me scanted or overlooked in public memory. Historians say that some 180,000 Black soldiers (and 20,000 Black navymen) served the Union. Ira Berlin emphasized that they included more than 135,000 coming directly from slavery.
In the video, I especially appreciated Eric Jacobson's expression of hope for how things could look 50 years from now, when slavery as a public history topic will be routine and unremarkable instead of new and daring.
(And when maybe way fewer people will come to antebellum forced-labor farms--which today we still misremember with the connotatively outrageous term "plantations"--expecting to hear about elegance, serenity, wealth, and refinement, but not crimes against humanity.)
Mr. Jacobson's hope for the future is why, it seems to me, you have to add a second sentence if you borrow phrasing from Thomas Jefferson and predict that nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing Civil War slavery escapees. You have to add: But not yet.
Glad to learn that those people in Franklin are doing all that stuff to maybe make it less than 50 years.
Another Civil War Memory posting from which I learned a lot and for which I'm grateful.
The overall story calls to mind, for me anyway, the work that Monticello belatedly but blessedly began some years ago--the work of making the huge Black majority of Monticello's 18th century residents a big part of THAT overall story.
And I was glad to learn of the new statue in Franklin honoring Black United States Civil War soldiers. Talk about something from slavery that seems to me scanted or overlooked in public memory. Historians say that some 180,000 Black soldiers (and 20,000 Black navymen) served the Union. Ira Berlin emphasized that they included more than 135,000 coming directly from slavery.
In the video, I especially appreciated Eric Jacobson's expression of hope for how things could look 50 years from now, when slavery as a public history topic will be routine and unremarkable instead of new and daring.
(And when maybe way fewer people will come to antebellum forced-labor farms--which today we still misremember with the connotatively outrageous term "plantations"--expecting to hear about elegance, serenity, wealth, and refinement, but not crimes against humanity.)
Mr. Jacobson's hope for the future is why, it seems to me, you have to add a second sentence if you borrow phrasing from Thomas Jefferson and predict that nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will esteem the multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing Civil War slavery escapees. You have to add: But not yet.
Glad to learn that those people in Franklin are doing all that stuff to maybe make it less than 50 years.