James Loewen explaining what secession was all about.

"Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery"

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/of-course-the-civil-war-was-about-slavery-26265/

This article was picked up at the History News Network at this link:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/134784.html

2. http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/12/20-7 Short item about slavery and states' rights.

Haley Barbour and his comments on the White Citizens' Councils. Update, Further Update.

By the way, the White Citizens' Councils did sometime call themselves just that.

Anyways, Haley Barbour in an interview here, http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/boy-yazoo-city_523551.html?page=3, has Barbour explaining that the White Citizens' Council's as a force for good in race relations.

The Internet is having articles popping up all over about it.

Actually, the Citizens' Councils were extremely racist. You can read the entire run of their newspaper here: http://www.citizenscouncils.com/.

Blogger Yglesias here has a review of the Weekly Standard's interview here:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/haley-barbours-affection-for-the-white-supremacist-citizens-council/

Yglesias blog has a link to http://www.citizenscouncils.com/

A lot of blogs are linking to Yglesias' blog which means a lot of people will get a link to the Citizens' Council web page.

UPDATE:

Another interesting article at Salon.com.

http://www.salon.com/news/race/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/12/20/haley_barbour_civil_rights

FURTHER UPDATE:

An interesting article by David A. Love. It mentions my Citizens Council website.

http://www.laprogressive.com/rankism/gop-strives-hate-groups-respectable/

"Journal of Society for Commercial Archaeology" publishes article on Jefferson Davis Highway

The exact bibliographic note is, "More Imagined Than Real," Journal of Society for Commercial Archaeology, Vol. 28 No. 2, 2010 Fall, pages 14-19. The author is Euan Hague.

We have another article planned for publication with a very prestigious journal and additionally hope to have a book sometime in the future. I am proposing the title, "The Lost Highway to White Supremacy." I am open to other ideas.

John Stewart and Larry Wilmore on the Sesquicentennial Secession Ball/History in Cambodia

I am getting a hang of clip embedding. This segment by John Stewart and Larry Wilmore is simply hilarious. When Larry Wilmore says "heritage not hate" you are going to be laughing so hard you might want to hold on to your chair.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The South's Secession Commemoration
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

I think video shows how the Lost Cause has really been rejected so thoroughly by such a widespread segment of the nation that it is now being ridiculed openly and emphatically. I also like that they refer to primary source documents.

This is the link to the embedded video, http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-december-9-2010/the-south-s-secession-commemoration

A lot of people probably haven't thought through the issues regarding the Confederacy and neo-Confederate rationalizations. So the Secession Ball has resulted in responses in print and on video that explain what the Confederacy was all about to people who probably didn't know a lot of the historical record and hadn't thought through the Confederate "heritage" rationalizations. In the end the Secession Ball has probably hurt neo-Confederacy more than my two books combined had done so far.

On the more serious side, here is a really interesting article of Cambodia addressing the issues of the history of the Khmer Rouge.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cambodia-education-20101210,0,1672919.story

Perhaps they can have a Museum of the Khmer Rouge which will be a reliquary for artifacts of that era and hand out prizes to burnish their reputation.

Keith Olbermann on NBC on the Secession Ball in South Carolina

The link is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnXqjsmmqNI

The video segment on the NBC website has been pulled, but you can see it at the above link. Warning some bad language.

What I think is significant is that leading figures are not hesitant to reject Lost Cause rationalizations for neo-Confederacy and are quite quick to belligerently express their opposition.

It will be interesting to see if in opposition to Keith Olbermann some conservative commentators defend the Secession Ball. The website for the ball is here: http://www.scsecessiongala.org/

Trying to reject the Museum of the Confederacy.

I wrote four letters to the judges for the Founders Award of the Museum of the Confederacy (MOC) asking that my new book, "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader," not be considered for any prize from the MOC. I copied all the letters and sent them with a cover letter to S. Waite Rawls. I sent all five mailings by certified post. I wrote this letter because I got word that they would consider it for an award if copies were sent to the four judges. In fact copies of the book were asked for by the MOC and copies are going to be sent to them by my publisher over my strongly stated objections.

This is the URL for the book:

http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1338

Unfortunately it seems that they are going to consider the book for the award anyway. As was explained by John Coski, in an email sent to me earlier today, it isn't my decision. Of course they are right, it is their award and I don't have a say, but I was hoping my letter to them would bring sure rejection of any award.

This is an eventuality that I didn't plan for and at this time, I don't have a plan other then it is probably time I did writing critical of the MOC. I am very unhappy over this possibility. I am thinking of an emergency plan. I suppose this blog post is the first step. I really don't want any book of mine to receive an award from the MOC. I am going to write about an interesting speech at the MOC about the MOC published in the Southern Partisan as the next step.

The following is the text of the letter sent to four judges and copies of each letter sent to S. Waite Rawls.

Dear XXX:

I am writing you to tell you that I do not want any book of mine to be considered for any award by the Museum of the Confederacy. More specifically I don’t want “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader,” co-edited by Edward H. Sebesta and James Loewen, University Press of Mississippi considered for an award by the Museum of the Confederacy either for 2010, or in the future.

Not to be presumptuous that the “Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader,” would win any award from the Museum of the Confederacy, but if the book did win some type of award, I would reject the award publically and use the occasion to criticize the Museum of the Confederacy.

Finally, I should let you know that in debate with James McPherson, noted Civil War historian, I have spoken out against the Museum of the Confederacy on Pacifica Radio Network.


Sincerely Yours,


You would think that would be enough to put an end to any consideration, but evidently not.

As a preliminary to better understand my opposition to the MOC I suggest people might read www.templeofdemocracy.com/breaking.htm.

The Grio has an article on neo-Confederates. "Reader" mentioned

It is a nice article by David A. Love at The Grio, a NBC website.

http://www.thegrio.com/politics/why-celebrate-secession-civil-war-revisionists-sidestep-slavery.php?page=1

It is two pages so click to the next page.

David A. Love is Executive Editor at www.blackcommentator.com.

James Loewen, Heidi Beirich, Euan Hague and I mentioned in article on Neo-Confederates in "Mother Jones" magazine

Adam Weinstein has an article about neo-Confederates and the Sesquicentennial in "Mother Jones" at this link:

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/12/video-confederate-cool-again-south-slavery-lincoln

James Loewen, Heidi Beirich, Euan Hague and I are mentioned as "great historians" with a link to my blog where they can find out about both books.

James Loewen in the "New York Times" on Secession

The "New York Times" had an article titled, "Celebrating Secession Without Slaves." Didn't use the word neo-Confederate. Discusses the celebrations of the Confederacy and the omission of the issue of slavery. Loewen's picture is with the article.

Article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/30confed.html

James Loewen says:

Most historians say it is impossible to carve out slavery from the context of the war. As James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” put it: “The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”

In its secession papers, Mississippi, for example, called slavery “the greatest material interest of the world” and said that attempts to stop it would undermine “commerce and civilization.”

The story got picked up and seems to be everywhere on the Internet. Ta-Nehisi Coates commented on the New York Times article with an extensive quote from our book.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/they-have-encouraged-and-assisted-thousands-of-our-slaves/67190/

Mr. Coates is using our book just the way it was intended to be used. When some neo-Confederate makes his wild historical claims, you can just quote the Confederates in their own words, and dispel the neo-Confederates' stuff and nonsense.

History News Network picked up on the story in Breaking News here:
http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/134085.html

Generally the book hasn't been mentioned, but some people will take the initiative and find Loewen's books including our book.

It isn't even 2011 yet, and it seems that the Sesquicentennial will be very different than the Centennial of the Civil War. No neo-Confederate nonsense seems to be the theme.