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Put simply, as a civil war aficionado, I have consumed various primary sources and secondary ones produced in less contentious times. There has been a dramatic shift in tone and removal of information over the past two decades, all of which have yet to be predicated by anything like new information.
I'm not even arguing the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It very clearly was the most major factor in the conflict. Just that the effort to cast it into cut-and-dry, black and white, hero-villain bullshit is just so obvious if you're remotely educated on the subject. I won't be gaslit about it.
I hope no one here is trying to cast hero-villain bullshit. My knowledge of the civil war comes is not as specific as yours or hlynka’s, yet I don’t believe it relies on sources written in the last 20 years. I’m in favor of argument from primary sources and resisting the urge to paint today’s values on a 150-year-old conflict.
My objection to Jake was similar to token’s. When a guy shows up, drops two or three classic revisionist lines, and insists that the whole premise of Civil War scholarship is “pernicious lies,” it’s not hard to see where he’s going. I have not been particularly reassured by his subsequent responses. If, like me, token suspected him of playing motte-and-bailey, making the motte explicit was a reasonable decision.
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As another civil war nerd; how do you know how haven't already been gaslit? There was a strong, well funded revisionist and revanchist effort to deny the historical reality of the south, the civil war, and the way the war was fought for several decades up until at least the 1960's.
How do you know the sources you read weren't based Rutherford's feelings about it rather than the historical reality?
It's turtles all the way down if we want to go tit for tat on "how do you know". What I can say about my older textbooks is they use far less emotional language and have more graphs than contemporary cruft.
Again: Do they? When you read accounts of EG Shiloh from pre about 2006 you'd think Johnny Reb had carried the day and not gotten driven from the field. When you look at nice books full of nice graphs from those days, you might notice the casualty numbers are somewhere between "enthusiastic" and Plutarch, with the union loosing something like 2 times as much as they actually did; by folding in a certain amount of loses to disease and desertion into battlefield casualties while at the same time only counting Confederates that were shot dead on the field. This leads to ridiculous figures (again, to pick shiloh) where the union looses twice as many men on the line in a battle where the confederates attacked, lost, and retreated.
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