African American Letters during the civil war
thoughtportal reblogged
Holy shit, fucking drag him
The highlighted portions are good, but I also really like this line:
"People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War."
Jamelle Bouie explains to Sarah what the Reconstruction era was, why it remains relevant today, and how this history lesson is one that could get some high school teachers into legal trouble due to passage of anti-CRT laws. Jamelle at the New York Times Jamelle's podcast Unclear and Present Danger Jamelle discussing the Electoral College on YWA Jamelle talking with Sarah about the Saw series on You Are Good.
Disney Plus is launching with the stated intention of streaming the entire Disney library...except for Song of the South, the 1946 animation/live-action hybrid film set on a post-Civil War plantation, which was theatrically re-released as recently as 1986, served as the basis for the ride Splash Mountain, but has never been available in the US on home video. What is Song of the South, why did Disney make it, and why have they held the actual film from release, while finding other ways to profit off of it? Across six episodes of our new season, we’ll dig into all facets of Song of the South’s strange story. Join us, won’t you?
Because of the modest size and low cost of the carte de visite, this new art form signaled the democratization of photography. Sitting for one’s portrait was no longer a sole luxury of the upper crust. In the United States, the popularity of the carte de visite coincided with the Civil War, and many soldiers left their loved ones with one as a token of remembrance. As Andrea L. Volpe writes in the New York Times, for black soldiers in particular it was a powerful “claim to recognition” in a society that had rendered them invisible. Volpe also describes the way images of soldiers and freed black slaves were used to rally support for the Union, and establish a nascent form of national identity during this time of severe social and political fissures.
More broadly, the carte de visite was a means of communicating social importance and forming relationships. Just as we follow friends on Instagram today to connect with others, so too did cartes de viste establish and solidify social bonds. The importance of cartes de viste led American physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. to deem them the “sentimental ‘green-backs’ of civilization” in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863, due to their omnipresence and unique emotional appeal. Holmes noted wryly: “Jonathan does not think a great deal of the Venus of Milo, but falls into raptures over a card-portrait of his Jerusha.”
Still, throughout the second half of the 19th century, both the carte de visite and the cabinet card were essential to photography’s development. While most of the images were simple depictions of individuals and couples posing in a photography studio, some photographers got wildly creative. In his book A Concise History of Photography (1965), Helmut Gernsheim noted that each decade brought new visual trends to the cards. In the 1860s, it was common for the portrait subject to pose in front of a column and curtain, while 1870s imagery was all about rustic bridges. Images in the 1880s prominently featured hammocks, swings, and railway carriages; the following decade brought palm trees and cockatoos. In the first decade of the 20th-century, wealthier folks chose to pose for their cartes de visite while seated in their new motor cars.
a story about slavery by a different name.
The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.
Nothing is easier to spark than an appetite for war, and nothing harder to sustain than a continued appetite for war once a country learns what war is really like. War hunger and war hatred are parts of the same cycle of mass arousal and inhibition.
This demographic paradox—a population large enough to be terrifying to the majority population nearby but not large or concentrated enough to claim its own national territory—was part of the tragedy, and increased the brutality by increasing the fear. The adjusted percentage of the Jewish population in Poland before the Holocaust was similar, and had similar implications: enough to loom large in the minds of their haters, not enough to be able to act without assistance in the face of an oppressor.
This urge to “earn” full citizenship by effort instead of by claiming it as a birthright seems forlorn now, a product of minds exposed so long to toxic bigotry that some of it had seeped inside and curdled into self-hatred. But, as Gates shows, it was possible to be entirely committed to the rights of black people while still being convinced of the need for education to uplift them—indeed, while still voicing sympathy for the travails of the defeated South.
Du Bois wanted to assert the lasting value and significance of what had been achieved in the all too brief period of black political enfranchisement. We couldn’t understand the enormity of the betrayal, Du Bois thought, if we didn’t understand the magnitude of what was betrayed.
Du Bois poises “property and privilege” against “race and culture” as causes that led to the reconquest of the South by white supremacy, and, though his Marxist training insists that it must somehow all be property and privilege, his experience as an American supplies a corrective afterthought or two. The motives of the South were, as Du Bois eventually suggests, essentially ideological and tribal, rather than economic. He recognized that, in a still familiar pattern, poor whites “would rather have low wages upon which they could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage,” It is the same formula of feeling that makes the “white working class” angrier at the thought that Obamacare might be subsidizing shiftless people of color than receptive to the advantages of having medical coverage for itself.
a long fight for freedom, with too many losses along the way, can be sustained only by a rich and complicated culture. Resilience and resistance are the same activity, seen at different moments in the struggle. It’s a good thought to hold on to now.
a thread about the civil war and wealth after it.
While working on our Slate Academy podcast, The History of American Slavery, we encountered many types of slavery denial—frequently disguised as historical correctives and advanced by those who want to change (or end) conversation about the deep impact of slavery on American history. We’d like to offer counterarguments—some historical, some ethical—to the most common misdirections that surface in conversations about slavery.
Read more of the narrative here. http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/rice.htm
Also the Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume X, Missouri Narratives Kindle Edition is free right now on amazon here.