Thread by @owenbroadcast

hey can i get uhhhhhhh single cohesive narrative about a historical event that isnt moral grandstanding

i like, literally just want you to tell me what happened bro

historians be like, yes i have a phd:

idk where else to put this information but if anyone wants an interesting zeitgeist temperature reading i was listening to a yale class on the civil war from like ten years ago (while doing other things obviously) [...]

professor tells a story about a woman who wanted to remove the confederate monuments from her town and he laughs at her like "wow you're so dumb" and tells her to read his book and the whole class laughs also as though she was being comically naive thinking it would help anything

kind of tracks with my own experience honestly. i grew up around liberal mecca (death mecca babylon), but i have family from the south, and when i went there and saw confederate stuff even in my hyper anarchist punk times i never thought of it as pro-... anything.

i even went to stone mountain. i remember walking around, looking at everything, and the idea that it was part of some larger narrative just like... wasnt in my mind at all. of course im not from there but i imagine if that happened now id be "prepped" to see it in a certain way.

thats just an interesting data point i consider sometimes, me as this punk kid literally looking for things to be angsty and mad about but because the larger society didnt tell me to think of something in a certain way, i didnt, even though now seeing it that way is mandatory