As I’ve had to say before- that’s an inaccurate take that whitewashes the british empire and its relationship with slavery. Abolitionism was not a mainstream view or a realistic prospect when the colonies revolted, and this motivation is only ever applied in retrospect.
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Absolutely, my intent was to contrast dubious myths, rather than suggest either was gospel truth.
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A major part of the problem with national-centric narratives, if you ask me. But as we’re in the age of nation-states still, I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. But it certainly distorts what happened in the past, but then again, I suppose almost any framing can be distorting…
We could learn a lot by comparing different approaches to the same historical event - what does it look like from the Native side, the colonists side, the British, the Canadian, etc… Or tell the story from the perspective of the Atlantic as a framing reference… from the perspective of the common people instead of the elites, etc…
I have to agree, since once slavery was abolished, it just emerged in a new form.
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crossposting from the GOP assholes thread…
He’s got on crocs!!! 
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Apparently they’re using her name and legacy to raise money for Ukraine:
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Have I been doing it wrong these past 10-15 years or whatever? I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself in those terms… 
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“Historian as Detective” books were de rigeur when I was an undergrad and grad student. Every methods class had some book with that genre of title. It’s also a simple shorthand for explaining to elementary school kids what the job is like.
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Historians are detectives, though. Searching for clues to what has happened, following leads to forgotten discussions of past events, correlating details to gain an understanding of the past so that we can remember it and be better prepared for what is yet to come.
Historians provide the societal memory that we so desperately need.
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I mean… I know what I do… I personally do not think of what I do in those terms, primarily because I’m often dealing with historical narratives. that are in broadstrokes already pretty well known. There can be some of that in what I do, but I’ve just never saw myself as being a detective, so much as being someone who is seeking to reconfigure our understanding of already well-known narratives…
Personally, I prefer Hayden White’s argument that history is a story telling medium. I have no doubt other historians view themselves in that manner, but that doesn’t make my own viewpoint less true.
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I totally agree; I wasn’t trying to explain your profession to you, and I hope I didn’t come across that way. Given the blatant attempts to distort recent events by so many of those at one end of the political spectrum, I wanted to express my view of the importance of historians.
I’m a big believer in history; I hold the opinion that we have to have an understanding of where we’ve been to help us understand how we got to where we are now. I occasionally get a little pushback from students in my classes (“this is a Computer Science course, not a History course”), but I point out that everything we develop today is built upon the experiences of people who did things in the past, and we need to understand how and why they did those things in those particular ways. Only then can we begin to look at why software and hardware work the way they do, and then perhaps to find a way to make them better at it.
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I appreciate that. We need it. And honestly, the attack is not just from the far right at this point. We’ve been seeing the dismantling of history departments in the drive for cost-savings for several years now. Few of us can get stable jobs and all of that is feeding into the far right arguments about history. It’s depressing.
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This sounds like an interesting book:
But also isn’t this conclusion a little bit of…
with regards to how what happened to her mother would have traumatized her? I mean, her father ordered her mother’s death and helped cook up a bunch of evidence against her… So, I would assume that Elizabeth was traumatized by all that…
What is new to me, is the connections Anne Boleyn forged with to feminist thinkers of the era while living in France. THAT to me seems like what is novel in Borman’s research. The wives are almost always positioned as either manipulators and schemers or pawns in the political games of men. The fact that Boleyn was forging connections to women thinkers, and that Parr (Elizabeth’s last step mother) encouraged a young Elizabeth to study the same person her mother looked up to and admired is the real historical revelation to my mind. So much of the story of the British reformation and the tudor era is told through the lens of the men, and the women, despite their very centrality to this history, are often seen as pawns or an after thought…
This is the book being referenced…
Which isn’t new, so I’m not sure what the point of this story actually was? Still… interesting!
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The manipulation of military history and attempts to change that in the future:
Also an event I’d never heard of before, a Memorial Day Massacre - more history about cops as strikebreakers:
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