Well, folks, I’ve been sitting here for two hours, staring at the screen and trying to think of something to get the fingers moving, and I have? Nothing. It appears it’s a rare dry day here, and in the meantime, I’ve got some work backing up, so I’d best get to it. A few linkies for those who care.
I think Prospero was asking about the Grande Ballroom here in Detroit a few days back. There’s a new documentary coming out; you can watch the overlong trailer here, including many many shots of the place as it looks today, i.e., wrecked.
Now here’s a WikiLeak I can get behind: A “major U.S. bank still in existence,” coming soon.
It’s been 10 years since Bush v. Gore. Jeffrey Toobin considers the worst Supreme Court case ever.
You might not recognize the American South’s version of the Civil War being “celebrated” next year.
I think I need a crossword puzzle and a quick walk. Let’s try again tomorrow.
LAMary said on November 30, 2010 at 11:22 am
When my boys were younger they used to go to a great day camp in the mountains above Pasadena. It had been there for years and like lots of places of that nature it had names for things that I never heard used outside of that day camp. The toilets were called wikis. I can’t lose the association of wiki and toilet. When I hear the term wikileaks, it’s not a pretty mental image.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 30, 2010 at 11:29 am
So will the large US bank actively pursue legal action against Assange or not? Frankly, I’m mildly amused by the whole thing (Hillary’s quote summed up the day on “you should hear what we say about you”), except that it’s just more of the narcotic pumped into the dying media patient’s veins. They need stimulants in the national & international reporting field, not more cheap gimme ‘ludes tossed over the transom.
Which is what center & left folk dislike about FoxNews, ne c’est pas?
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LAMary said on November 30, 2010 at 11:35 am
http://gawker.com/5701955/corrections-wire-creator-not-actually-optimistic-at-all
The NYT makes an interesting correction.
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alex said on November 30, 2010 at 11:44 am
LA M–
If you think wikileaks conjures strange mental images, yesterday I had twinges of sympathetic pain at the talk of streaming Netflix through my Wii.
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Mark P. said on November 30, 2010 at 11:49 am
What is so discouraging, if not outright frightening, is that so many white people in the South feel pretty much the same way today that their ancestors felt 150 years ago. Today they are mainly Republicans, but a few years ago they were Democrats. They all identify themselves as conservatives, and quite a few as Tea Partiers. They would all deny vehemently that they are racists, but down here, we know the truth. And, unfortunately, not all of them are down here. If they were, I think the rest of us down here could move somewhere else and happily let them secede again. The nation would be better off without them.
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brian stouder said on November 30, 2010 at 11:51 am
That Civil War link almost puts tears in one’s eyes. It is almost amazing, on the one hand; and yet so depressingly predictable, on the other.
An understanding of the American Civil War, excluding slavery? That’s akin to trying to understand Wall Street, excluding money; satellite technology, absent gravity.
Aside from that – last night on Final Jeopardy, the subject was The Civil War; and I said “BET IT ALL!!” –
and then, when they came back from commercial, the answer was revealed, and I would have LOST IT ALL!!
“These two state capitals were not recaptured by the Union army, before the end of the war”
(cue the annoying music)
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ROgirl said on November 30, 2010 at 11:55 am
Brian, I guessed right because the clue referred to a southeast state and a southwest state. I went for the obvious ones and was very surprised they were correct.
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LAMary said on November 30, 2010 at 11:56 am
I got the eastern one right, Brian, but had no clue about the western one.
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Jeff Borden said on November 30, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I’ve never understood the ongoing romanticism surrounding an act of treason committed by an entire region, but after living for four years in North Carolina, I echo Mark P.’s observations. There are large numbers of people who still believe the South was well within its rights and if the damned Yankees had just left them alone, all would have been well. That these arguments persist into the 21st century, that there remains a nostalgia for the “lost cause,” that the armies of gray are seen through a gauzy lens of romance, is both sad and sick.
It was a brutal, dirty, bloody, ugly war.
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Bob said on November 30, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Philosopher-king of the modern secesh, Hank Williams Jr., weighs in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cCu8H6RbbI
It’s just stunning to hear a modern man pining for a victory that would have preserved the right of Southerners to continue trading in black people as if they were livestock.
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nancy said on November 30, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Haven’t you heard, Bob? The invisible hand of the market would have freed the slaves by now.
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mark said on November 30, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Slavery required government to declare through legislation certain people to be property. The market has many excesses and addresses some social evils only slowly, if at all. But slavery is an argument for limited government, not against free markets.
The invisible hand hasn’t ended the war in Afghanistan, either. I guess that’s another failing of Adam Smith.
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Sue said on November 30, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Obviously here in Wisconsin there aren’t a lot of people routinely discussing the glory of the Old South, but I think the basic question I would like to ask them is “What would your country be like today if you had succeeded in forming a separate country?”.
One assumes that the slave-based economy would have morphed into something, but what? Agricultural, still? Based on what labor force? Would the new country be the one dealing with illegal immigrants from south of their border or would there be a productive alliance of some sort? Or would the remaining United States be dealing with an immigrant problem made up of people from this ‘new’ country who want to escape an apartheid-style government?
I find it hard to believe that the region would have turned into a shining beacon of tolerance in some kind of parallel universe.
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nancy said on November 30, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Of all the things you’ve posted here, Mark, that might be the most disingenuous of all. And that’s saying something.
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mark said on November 30, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Right, nancy. Slavery never existed/doesn’t exist in communist countries or those with totalitarian governments. It is an evil perpetuated by capitalism. There are no labor camps in the workers’ paradise of North Korea but IBM has clandestine plans for making computer chips plantation style. Yawn.
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nancy said on November 30, 2010 at 1:09 pm
I’m not talking about slavery in communist countries. I’m talking about the rose-colored hindsight of certain American southerners, who would a) like to forget that slavery played any role at all in the Civil War, and b) believe that even if it did, it would have been better for the south to shake off the peculiar institution “naturally,” and not at the point of a gun. I thought that was clear. Maybe it wasn’t.
But if you’re going to be deliberately obtuse, go join the News-Sentinel’s commenters. Maybe you could throw together a guest column for the op-ed page. It’s already been established they’ll publish anything.
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Jason T. said on November 30, 2010 at 1:18 pm
I just got back from visiting my girlfriend’s folks in Greeneville, Tenn., and I can confirm that in parts of the rural South, the Civil War never really ended. At best it was a cease-fire.
Greeneville is the hometown of Andrew Johnson — generally considered one of the worst U.S. presidents. I learned quite a bit about him, thanks to my government-funded National Park Service.
Johnson was a former slave owner who was viewed as trying to reintegrate the Confederacy back into the United States too quickly, and without changing the underlying power structures that led to the Civil War in the first place.
There was a prevailing view in Congress that the Confederate states should be punished and occupied; Johnson felt that was counterproductive, and allowed former Confederate soldiers to vote, hold office and own property once they signed a loyalty oath. In another attempt to placate Southerners, Johnson vetoed attempts to extend civil rights protections to African-Americans.
He also tangled with the Congress over their attempts to encroach on the power of the President to appoint and dismiss cabinet secretaries — and that’s what eventually led to his impeachment. The Supreme Court later ruled that Johnson was right, but his stubbornness and open contempt for the legislative branch proved that it’s possible to be both correct and an arrogant jerk.
Anyway: Save your Confederate money, boys! The South gonna rise again!
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Bob said on November 30, 2010 at 1:46 pm
I do think a victorious Confederacy would have abandoned slavery when mechanized farming and electrical automation underpriced slaves — at the cost of another 60, 70 or 80 years of buying and selling human beings. Three more generations of slaves? Four more generations?Then imagine, say, 10 million slaves not so much freed as discarded into the third-world hellhole the South would have become by the 1930s, ostracized by the rest of the civilized world for decades because of its peculiar institution.
Short form: My guess is that we would have been tied up fighting World War II along the Mason-Dixon front. Hitler would have found no more natural ally on Earth than an independent, unrepentant Confederacy.
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Mark P. said on November 30, 2010 at 1:47 pm
If the South should rise again, its currency would probably be worth about what a Confederate dollar was worth in, say, 1867. Once all the federal installations moved out of the South and the US government stopped paying Social Security, disability and unemployment, and stopped providing Medicare and assistance for Medicaid for southerners, the South would quickly become a third world country.
Right, Bob, if the South had won or if the South should somehow secede from the US tomorrow, the trajectory would be different but the end point would be the same, a hell-hole third world country.
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Jolene said on November 30, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Once all the federal installations moved out of the South and the US government stopped paying Social Security, disability and unemployment, and stopped providing Medicare and assistance for Medicaid for southerners, the South would quickly become a third world country.
Good point, Mark, especially since, as we know, some parts of the South are barely distinguishable from the third world now.
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Julie Robinson said on November 30, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Without air conditioners, the South still would be a third world country. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there.
Edit: Mary, did your kids’ camp give them camp names? A couple of those where our daughter worked did this and our Sarah became Sunny. To me, it was cult-like.
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nancy said on November 30, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Let’s not beat up on the South too much. I have high hopes for a get-together at the Coozledad ranch one of these days.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 30, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Anyone here read some of the Harry Turtledove alt-histories, where Robert E. Lee wins the Battle of Camp Hill after not having to fight the Battle of Antietam, since the three cigars and Order 191 were recovered by a Secesh and not a Billy Yank (in that timeline).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Few_Remain
He carries on with a view of the global consequences in another nine novels, following that one starting point — the cigars are picked up by a different soldier in 1862.
Note: Harry went back and took a second angle on the question with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_the_South
where a group of 2014 Afrikaners figure out how to go back to 1862 and offer Gen. Lee a large supply of AK-47s . . . but it doesn’t turn out quite how you might think. The internal lack of support for slavery even in the South is well outlined, and the economic non-viability of slave-run agriculture is touched on.
But it’s a different alternative history from the so-called Timeline-191 that Turtledove has written multiple books from (full disclosure: I think “How Few Remain” is a good read, but the continuation wore me out, and I quit after about four, maybe three).
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prospero said on November 30, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Interesting that those two unbowed Confederate capitals are in the two states that could probably take a hike right now and leave the Union better for it. Couple of odious governors, too.
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Deborah said on November 30, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Having grown up in Florida and having lived in Texas for 8 years of my adulthood, I’m very happy to have moved to the Midwest where there are glorious seasons and reasonable people. Eventual retirement to the Southwest (New Mexico) isn’t going to be anything like the South (I hope), for one thing there are seasons and so far the people we’ve met and made friends with there are more than reasonable.
I for one would love to see Coozledad’s ranch with all the critters (that includes neighbors).
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coozledad said on November 30, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Just drove past a couple of Confederate battle flags today on my way to South Boston, VA. The suckers preaching the sanctity of “the cause” are the same dependable idiots the Republicans appeal to when they’re ginning up the next resource war. The saddest part about it is they’re descendants of the trash the feudal southern society pushed to the margins, before deploying them as cannon fodder. The bloodline of the handful of criminals for whom the war was fought have pretty much been erased by nature, or at least the pathological tendency of the Lees and the Calhouns and the Davises to line breed until their basements and attics were inhabited by irreproducibles, chained among the pickled pig’s feet and canned string beans.
After the war, capitalism freed the white trash to cement their family ties by working in the mills: Momma, Deddy, Lil’ Stumpy, and that Sweet Lurleen (right fetching for fourteen) working to pay off what they owed to the mill store side by side at the looms. And if they got snotty about it, they got shot. By relatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loray_Mill_Strike
Oh, and Re Mark’s assessment of slavery and capitalism, he was obviously shielded from the tobacco farms, cotton plantations and the sugarcane farms of his own lifetime. And those kids who make his sneakers aren’t slaves: They’re just hopping the money train early.
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Mark P. said on November 30, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Nancy, I was born, and I live and work deep in the heart of Dixie, and I consider it not only a right, but a sacred obligation to beat up on the idiots down here.
Julie, I look forward with great anticipation to the day I can leave this part of the world and get to some place where you can work outside in the summer without drowning in your own sweat. And that has nothing to do with politics, only humidity.
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nancy said on November 30, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Another county heard from.
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LAMary said on November 30, 2010 at 2:36 pm
We had our share of textile strikes up in my part of the country. They involved underpaid immigrant labor. My father’s siblings worked in the silk mills of Paterson as children “rubbing spots out of silk,” was what my grandmother told me they did. My father was the only one in his family to finish high school. The rest went to work in the mills before they hit their teens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_Passaic_Textile_Strike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1913_Paterson_silk_strike
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Bob said on November 30, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Re: “another county heard from”
I don’t think Joe Barton could get any closer to saying, “Frag Obama!” without a Secret Service agent escorting him to charm school.
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Sue said on November 30, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Nancy @ 28, it’s a good thing, then, that Obama today admitted that he should have reached out more to Republicans these last two years. I hope he has at least a stump left when he pulls his hand back.
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Sue said on November 30, 2010 at 2:56 pm
BTW, has anyone been following the DADT news conference? I’m picking up that Gates and Admiral (??) are telling congress not only to get this sucker passed quickly (so it can be implemented carefully) but to keep the political b.s. out of the process.
What I saw was some classy message work. I’m impressed.
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Dexter said on November 30, 2010 at 3:08 pm
In demeanor if not scope, Joe Barton continues to remind me of Wisconsin’s own Sen. Joe McCarthy.
I have remarked here before of my twenty or so trips to Charleston and of my two youthful summers touring the US South.
On our touristy carriage ride down Rainbow Row the young college age lady who was our guide became the first person I ever heard talk about “The War of Northern Aggression”. I had read that, but never actually had heard it uttered. And, it was a real eye-opener.
Like I was brainwashed into believing all the “bright shining lies” (apologies to Neil Sheehan) of US involvement in Indochina, intelligent people of the US South have had it ingrained into their noggins that slavery had little to do with the reasons for the Civil War. There will be no changing this, either…at least none that I can see.
Even though yankees have just about taken over huge areas of the South, such as the Piedmont Triad region of technology, there are still family traditions and legacies passed on of “The War” and “northern aggrsssion” , and “why, we grew up and played side-by-side with the nigras.” George Wallace’s conversion to sanity was the exception, in my opinion.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 30, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Secy. Gates & Adm. Mullen (http://twitter.com/thejointstaff, and yes, he tweets fairly regularly on it) did indeed handle the presser well, and the upshot is: git ‘r done, and let’s move on. #DADTfail
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ROgirl said on November 30, 2010 at 3:24 pm
The Taiwanese spin on Wikileaks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdxpvr1GQU4
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basset said on November 30, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Jeff TMMO, I read both of those and the whole timeline… it was indeed pretty predictable after the first few, still interesting though. (Everyone else: it starts with an alternate Civil War and runs up through the WW2 era, complete with a Hitler figure.)
Jason T., Greeneville and most of east Tennessee had about as many Union supporters as Confederate, if not more; one reason why much of the area’s still Republican today.
Cooz, I come from a long line of Carolina millworkers and was named after Robert E. Lee… one of my forebears got into considerable trouble back in the Twenties or Thirties for trying to stuff his foreman’s arm into the mill machinery. When asked why, his reply was something like “Because I couldn’t get his head in there.”
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coozledad said on November 30, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Nancy: The electrician is coming out sometime this week to run power to the shop/guest house. It’s much nicer than it used to be, but I’m still at a loss for how people lived in it. When Llewd escaped I spoke with one of the neighbors who between drags off a cigarette and deep coughing spasms, told me “I grew up in that house. Ain’t it fell down?” I told him I’d been crawling around underneath it for a couple of years shocking it up with block, ripping out and replacing the sill plates and framing the termites had eaten. He started staring off into the middle distance at that point, certain I was crazy as hell.
My wife would agree, because I’ve told her I plan to build a cabin on a big outcrop of granite near the pond. She just nods quietly and says “Yes, dear. Of course you will.”
Basset: My Mom’s folks were mill people. Burlington industries mostly. Her dad was a big John L. Lewis man, then later, George Wallace.
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Sue said on November 30, 2010 at 3:44 pm
So, basset, when we all get together at the Coozathon that Nancy’s organizing (I assume we’re all invited), can we call you Bobby Basset? Or Bobby Lee Basset? If not, how much alcohol has to be involved before we can?
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Jeff Borden said on November 30, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley are spinning in their graves over the comparisons made by Joe Barton, as odious a little shitheel as ever walked into Congress.
I’m mildly surprised Mark didn’t mention that many of the slaves shipped to the Americas were captured and sold by other Africans to white slave traders. So, see, slavery in America was actually the fault of black folks.
My time in North Carolina broadened me a great deal. When I arrived in Charlotte in 1985, a black man was major and a Jew was president of council. That had not happened yet in Columbus, Ohio, my previous home port. I didn’t see or hear any more racist talk in Charlotte than I did in Ohio. But the rural areas were quite another story, and it was from there that Jesse Helms and the other crackers drew their strength in political campaigns.
One thing that still stands out for me was Southern hospitality. I learned that it was largely surface civility. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I thought it was striking that only two of the friends I made down there were native Southerners. The rest were all transplanted Yankees and Canadians. I’m much happier back in the Midwest and, yes, all the shitty, horrible, sucky winter weather is easier to tolerate –for me, at least– than the soul-withering, sweltering humidity of a Southern summer.
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Jolene said on November 30, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Sue, I just caught the end of the Gates/Mullen news conference and agree that it was very impressive. Am listening now to the two men–one a civilian DoD lawyer and the other a general–who led the study. They, too, are very impressive, as, it seems, is the work they did. The Post already has an article up about their work together and the report.
If you support repeal of DADT, this would be a good time to call your senator, especially if you are represented by Snowe, Collins, Brown, Voinovich, Lemieux, Ensign, or Murkowski. They are thought to be the most persuadable. But, really, the military leaders are so clear on this, it’s hard to see how anyone could vote against it–not that I don’t realize many will.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 30, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Oh, Voinovich’s office is already saying he will support it.
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Jolene said on November 30, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Great news, Jeff. Glad to hear it.
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Judybusy said on November 30, 2010 at 4:17 pm
I’ve been wanting to learn more about Reconstruction for a while. Can anyone recommend some good reads? I’ll have to check out the alt histories also mentioned.
As for racism in the south, I’ve heard a fair share of Balck people say at least it’s out in the open. It tends to be quieter and more insidious up here. I grew up in Minnesota, and clearly remember my dad telling me not to bring home any black boys. He was also quite unhappy with the Catholic boy I brought home a couple years later! I was somewhat inoculated against such nonsense by my mom. She has a lot of ignorant crap running around in her head, but at least she didn’t endorse my dad’s blatant bigotry.
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Jason T. said on November 30, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Jeff(tmmo) @ 23: I prefer James Thurber’s alternative history, “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox”:
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prospero said on November 30, 2010 at 5:07 pm
While I’ve lived much of my life in the South, I also recall death threats against open housing marches my family took part in in downtown Birmingham MI in 1968. Serious enough that there were ambulances on hand.
I was also in the Hub of the Universe for busing, National Guard in the streets, and Loise Day Hicks, a more vicious racist than Lester Msaddox ever even pretended to be. And for this iconoclastic episode.
Plenty of ignominy to go around.
I’d also point out that in the world of American newspapers, Ralph McGill and Reg Murphy of the Atlanta Constitution were way out on a limb practically by themselves on Civil Rights for nearly two decades, in the heart of Dixie. Murphy was kidnapped for his stands on civil rights and Vietnam, by an early, one man rightwing militia.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 30, 2010 at 5:26 pm
[clicks “Like” @44]
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DellaDash said on November 30, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Just back from a Thanksgiving road trip with my brother, who flew from San Francisco into Nashville, where I reside in a misleading Obama pocket ‘hood, surrounded by the rest of gun-totin, confederate Tennessee. Heading up to my hometown of Davenport, Iowa on the banks of the Mississippi River, where Dred Scott is known to have resided for a spell while still a slave but fighting the fight; we began to listen to ‘The Rivalry’ just as we crossed a border into Illinois.
The senatorial debates between Lincoln and Douglas of 1858 were the first to be recorded by the new technique of stenography. For Lincoln, it was all about the immorality of slavery, and the impossibility of building a strong nation on such a stained, inhumane foundation. Douglas was strictly into states’ rights, never coming close to addressing morals.
Douglas retained his seat in the Senate, but 2 years later that upstart Lincoln became President. As mentioned here already, it is striking that back then, the states’ rights contingent were the Dems, and the abolitionist posse were the Republicans.
On a different note, it was fun to play with an iPhone app my brother has written called iAmerica, funded by a Japanese consortium, that let’s you pull up points of interest within a quarter-mile of almost any exit on major freeways from coast to coast. It allowed us to avoid gassing up with BP, although their stations seem to have spilled all over the midwest. A feature of the app is that you can control it with your thumb and one finger, rather than needing both hands; yet it came a bit uncomfortably close to texting at times. Better to have a copilot running the GPS action. We had to laugh that back in the day, passing a joint in the front seat was illegal activity…now it’s passing the iPhone.
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coozledad said on November 30, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Judybusy: There have been a few historical overviews that mention this, but even the recent ones have an ugly bias in favor of the Klan. The setting is pretty much next door to where we live, and the race and class issues haven’t shifted at all, just the names of the political parties:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk-Holden_war
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adrianne said on November 30, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Just read “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson about the great migration of black Americans out of the South into the North, Midwest and West. Her subjects make it quite clear that their main motivation to flee the South was the sheer terrorism perpetrated against black people in the South ever since Reconstruction. They definitely encountered racism and prejudice every step of the way up North, but no widespread lynching and the inhumanity of Jim Crow laws.
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moe99 said on November 30, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Adrianne,
Thanks for the review of “The Warmth of Other Sons” Need to put that on my TBR list.
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Connie said on November 30, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Hallelujah Chorus flash mobs: http://www.etiquettehell.com/?p=1699
I liked the second one best.
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basset said on November 30, 2010 at 9:10 pm
DellaDash, do I know you in real life? I live in Bellevue, our box went for Obama in 08.
Sue, call me anything you want, alcohol or no, but only the middle name fits. Stealth Confederate, I guess.
Cooz, I think my kin worked in every mill from Rockingham to Spartanburg at one time or another. Inman Mills comes to mind, not sure about the rest.
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coozledad said on November 30, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Basset: How about Cone mills? My grandfather did electrical work for them at one point. He was about the right age to have been a Wobbly. Proved to be more of a racist than a utopian in the end.
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DellaDash said on November 30, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Basset – I’m not far from you, in Belmont-Hillsboro. So…Bellevue is another bama-oasis.
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Catherine said on December 1, 2010 at 1:13 am
Connie, thanks. That’s what I needed to get my head into a holiday space.
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basset said on December 1, 2010 at 8:35 am
Cooz, they might have ended up in any mill down there… my dad was the youngest of nine kids, single mother, he used to tell stories about how they’d move every time the rent was due.
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brian stouder said on December 1, 2010 at 9:28 am
Just read “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson about the great migration of black Americans out of the South into the North, Midwest and West.
Adrianne, I caught that author and Michele Norris, author of “The Grace of Silence: A Memoir” discussing their books on Book TV over the long weekend, and added both their books to my list. Norris has an Aunt Jemima story that alone would make the book a worthwhile venture (short version – her grandmother travelled around Texas portraying Aunt Jemima, for that company – and took the opportunity to be well-spoken and graceful, as she interacted with people; and Norris only found out about this chapter in her grandmother’s life long, long after the fact. Not for nothing, she notes how Aunt Jemima NOW looks like ‘girlfriend’ on the product packaging, as opposed to the matronly mammy of not too many years ago. She really captures the conflicted racial impulses at work in American culture)
By the way, an excellent survey of Reconstruction America is Eric Foner’s book – which I think is titled “Reconstruction”
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Connie said on December 1, 2010 at 9:55 am
Just read “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson about the great migration of black Americans out of the South into the North, Midwest and West.
I heard the author interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air and also read the book. That southern migration of blacks and of white southerners is a big part of the history of Michigan cities like Detroit, Flint, and Saginaw. For a fictional view of the white migration I recommend the wonderful novel “The Doll Maker” by Harriet Arnow.
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prospero said on December 1, 2010 at 7:37 pm
They parents didn’t have a thing to do with mills. Thet stood with everybody. It may have started with like some asshole;ike no going obe
K. These people fuckd us over like there was no going ober.
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