The UNC alumna writes
Aug. 21st, 2018 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwClass of 1976 1/2 (finished in December), represent!
Happy to see Sam go, sorry it wasn't months ago, to gather dust in the basement of a museum. The statue (1913) was better made than the 1920-ish ones that were mass produced and put in odd place.
The thing I always liked about his plaque was that it referred to the students who died in the "war of 1861-65." Weasel words, I suppose, but very clear. I grew up in the South and never heard the expression "war of Northern aggression" until I was an adult in Massachusetts, and people in the north were mocking Southerners. We had to take US history three times (5th grade, 8th grade, Junior year) plus a year of NC history, and nobody ever called it anything but the Civil War in class. We were told the untruth about the cause of the war being trade tariffs, though. That had been a problem but it was resolved before the 1860s. Read the documents (which we didn't, mostly) - slavery was the motivator, even though it really was true that 2/3 of white southerners didn't own enslaved people. That didn't mean that lots of them didn't aspire to. There is a great (and sad) slave narrative collected about people who were so desperate to appear richer than they were that they impoverished themselves (and the people they enslaved) even more, just to get up to the slaver class.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1327095?journalCode=fsla20
PS to people who followed me on LJ through my whole time at UMass Lowell, yeah, I have two unrelated, mostly unused, undergraduate degrees.
Happy to see Sam go, sorry it wasn't months ago, to gather dust in the basement of a museum. The statue (1913) was better made than the 1920-ish ones that were mass produced and put in odd place.
The thing I always liked about his plaque was that it referred to the students who died in the "war of 1861-65." Weasel words, I suppose, but very clear. I grew up in the South and never heard the expression "war of Northern aggression" until I was an adult in Massachusetts, and people in the north were mocking Southerners. We had to take US history three times (5th grade, 8th grade, Junior year) plus a year of NC history, and nobody ever called it anything but the Civil War in class. We were told the untruth about the cause of the war being trade tariffs, though. That had been a problem but it was resolved before the 1860s. Read the documents (which we didn't, mostly) - slavery was the motivator, even though it really was true that 2/3 of white southerners didn't own enslaved people. That didn't mean that lots of them didn't aspire to. There is a great (and sad) slave narrative collected about people who were so desperate to appear richer than they were that they impoverished themselves (and the people they enslaved) even more, just to get up to the slaver class.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1327095?journalCode=fsla20
PS to people who followed me on LJ through my whole time at UMass Lowell, yeah, I have two unrelated, mostly unused, undergraduate degrees.
