“It’s symbolic annihilation of history, and it’s done for a purpose”

Definitely Worth reading this post.

Student of the American Civil War

Here’s an interview with historian Edward Baptist, professor of history at Cornell University and author of the acclaimed The Half Has Never Been Told:  Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.  You can read the interview here.

In discussing how slavery is whitewashed on several tours of plantations, Baptist says, “There’s a great study that was done 10 or 12 years ago by a couple of British scholars, a black man and a white woman, who would go to these historical plantations and observe what they said on the tours. Were enslaved people described as slaves, or were they described as servants, or in some cases even workers? If they were described as workers, the investigator would ask, ‘Do you have records of the payroll?’ They went to about 180 of them. Many of them simply didn’t discuss the reality of what happened at all, even though enslaved people…

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