We took a family vacation in the early 90s and drove from East Texas all the way to Nashville. At the time, it felt like we stopped at every Civil War battlefield (twice) along the way. Seeing the meadows and rolling hills with cannons and other historical relics was a powerful sight. Imagining the sounds and smells of gunfire, the bravery and fear of the battles is a humbling moment. I recall a story about a Union guard talking to a Confederate soldier from a Tennessee unit who had been captured and noticing the young man\u2019s ill-fitted clothes and general state of shoddy equipment. He (paraphrasing) asked, \u201cWhy are you fighting? You don\u2019t appear to have a major stake in this war.\u201d The young man replied, \u201cBecause you\u2019re here.\u201d A few years ago I took an interest in researching my family ancestry and found cousins from Tennessee who served in the CSA. They were mountain folk who didn\u2019t have slaves, a plantation, or much of anything else to their name, but I can imagine them giving the Union soldier the same reasoning for taking up arms.<\/p>\n
While the current age we live in likes to take American history and \u2018Disneyfy\u2019 it into simplistic caricatures of a good\/evil binary, the complexities and nuance remains, especially for the War of Northern Aggression. The current charge that history is not being fully taught is correct, but for different reasons than the detractors point out. All they want is history taught in a manner to ensure those who have been deemed the personification of evil stay that way. This isn\u2019t relegated to only American history, but Western Civilization overall. This is how society has arrived to the asinine conclusions that only Europeans conquered and enslaved other peoples throughout world history. It doesn\u2019t acknowledge the reality that human nature hasn\u2019t aged – that all of humanity contains the ability for committing depravities against their fellow man, while also being able to show empathy and compassion at other times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We took a family vacation in the early 90s and drove from East Texas all the way to Nashville. At the time, it felt like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2501,5,1489],"tags":[3846,856,1596,197,3890],"class_list":["post-22360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americana","category-current-events","category-guest-contributors","tag-arthurincali","tag-civil-war","tag-guest-contributors","tag-history","tag-revisionist-history"],"yoast_head":"\n