This is fabulous:
Nicely done. https://t.co/ryMTpMbJ4p
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 14, 2019
We need to do this for every damned one left in the country if we can’t just tear the damned things down.
Reader Interactions
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Yarrow
Love this idea. So good. Maybe also put up monuments to Sherman and Lincoln.
jl
Thanks. An encouraging sign.
The US needs more memorials that commemorate, celebrate, and explain, the liberation of slaves. And explain Reconstruction, Jim Crow and long history of segregation and oppression going into 20th century. Seems like very few of those in the US compared to other countries, that had a history of slavery. That includes Caribbean. And also Africa. I watched a documentary about some of the memorials in Africa. Some of them explain native Africans’ role in the slave trade, as well as Europeans. They can be honest with themselves about their own history. Why can’t we?
And not only in the South. Need some in other parts of the country. Memorials in California about genocide of CA Native Americans, oppression of East Asians would be appropriate. How about a plaque for every Japanese farm that was stolen during WWII in CA Central Valley?
The Moar You Know
@jl: Learn your history. Most of the land that was stolen was not from Central Valley farmers but from the coastal farmers. Even back then it was worth more as residential real estate than farms. And it grinds their descendants, that land in sum is worth trillions of dollars.
High school friend of mine whose parents somehow did NOT lose the 10 acres they had, she just cashed out that parcel for over 20 million dollars.
Kay
It’s so encouraging to watch this because to me it goes to the (belief) that the truth always comes out. You want to believe that but it’s so rarely true.
We were all sold a kind of political campaign that trumped our own history. I want the real history. It was in a way stolen from us by these savvy narrative creators. The truth will be better. Harder, but better. I can deal with it. They’ll have to deal with it too.
Kent
@The Moar You Know: And of course that is just rounding error compared to how much land in CA and elsewhere was stolen from Native Americans.
Kay
The justification for the war from the states themselves is the part that kills me. This is what they wrote! It was about slavery! Their own documents.
How in the HELL did we allow that to get stomped on by this story these people wanted to tell? Just a big lie that is contradicted by the participants and original sources themselves.
David Anderson
I will help fundraise for a wide spread erection of Sherman statues throughout the south if they want to remember the civil war
chris
Man, I sure killed that last thread! NC senator retires, with pics
jl
And, I think dating some of the Confederate memorials is a good idea. Most of them were put up decades after the Civil War, not as memorials to the war dead, but as social engineering to enforce Jim Crow and segregation.
I wonder if the statue this sign explains was one of those mass produced in early 20th century to meet demand for a cheap and generic Confederate memorial? If a town didn’t have money for a statue of some general who was loyal to the Confederate cause after the Civil War, they would by a mass produced statue of a soldier.
And if you want a statue of a Confederate General, how about James Longstreet? Very interesting career. He was shot and captured defending New Orleans during Reconstruction, leading an integrated defense force, from a white supremacist insurrection. He also had an interesting take on the Civil War for an ex-Confederate general: “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.” Only one little dinky memorial to him, where he was born, in the whole South. Interesting omission for a Confederate memorial movement that claims it is really interested in explaining and preserving history.
worn
Fuck yeah, DeKalb! That’s the county in which I was born and spent a good portion of my childhood. It’s nice for once to feel good about where I come from; doesn’t happen so very often in these dark days.
Hungry Joe
Steel shrouds would be a nice addition: “Beneath this shroud … “
Turner Hedenkoff
A simple “For Participation” would have worked, too.
Mike in NC
Where does SPLC stand on groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Daughters of the Confederacy? They seem to be little better than the KKK itself.
Steve in the ATL
1. Love it! FYI Dekalb County, Georgia is majority black, so it’s a particularly bad place to have monuments to slavery.
2. After having a copy of “The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson” hanging in my house for years, I finally realized how inappropriate this painting was and not only removed it but also destroyed it.
3. About 20 years ago I was in Sacramento on business and staying in the Hyatt Regency by the state capital. While running in the park across the street, I noticed a grove of trees in the center and checked it out. It was a Civil War monument honoring the Union Army and the trees were grown from cuttings that troops brought back from “the American South.” I felt really weird at the time–I’d never seen a Yankee Civil War monument before. I thought they didn’t care!
jl
@The Moar You Know: Thanks for the information. I am most familiar with Central Valley history. Two farms next to my family farm were Japanese and that was stolen from them.
And, I didn’t say anything to contradict your statement. Please don’t be so snotty about it.
Steve in the ATL
@David Anderson:
My mother grew up on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. A few years after she and my dad married, they moved to the north side of Chicago. I always wondered how she felt (or if she even noticed) living right off Sheridan Road….
Steve in the ATL
@jl: the people who want statues of Confederate generals are far more interested in Nathan Bedford Forrest than James Longstreet
Inventor
I think statues to Southern Unionists should be required. They were the bravest of the brave and should be celebrated for not being traitors.
jonas
Well, the people defending these monuments always say it’s about “preserving history.” Way to call their bluff, DeKalb County! There should be a plaque like this in front of every Confederate statue in the country, because virtually every single one of them was a intended as a monument to Jim Crow and the Lost Cause myth, not the “Confederate dead” or whatever.
CliosFanboy
How about some monuments to southern Unionists and to the USCTS??
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
White supremacists care, often to the point of fanaticism. White live-and-let-lives are not very motivated. The former outnumber the latter to this day in the South, in addition to the motivation gap. They used to be much, much worse.
dmsilev
Is there any rule prohibiting installing a second memorial right next to the first one? I’m thinking of giant statues of William Sherman and George Thomas towering over the Confederates.
Steve in the ATL
@dmsilev: Richmond, VA has been doing a bit of that to bring Monument Avenue more in line with reality. BTW they get touchy there if you refer to the statues of Confederate generals as “second place trophies”.
Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina had laws banning Union monuments.
MFA
If contextual signage is ever prohibited, I would suggest the affected town councils (etc.) respond by suspending public exposure laws within 150 feet of such monuments and putting up signs denoting the area immediately surrounding the monument as a public urinal.
Amir Khalid
@MFA:
There might be a public-hygiene issue with that.
Amir Khalid
@MFA:
Also too, wouldn’t there be a first-amendment issue with the state forbidding local authorities from putting up signs to contextualise pro-Confederacy monuments?
Kylroy
I want to see the words “Treason in Defense of Slavery” in front of *every* monument devoted to the Confederacy.
Shantanu Saha
@Amir Khalid: Just install drains around the base of the monuments.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
It’s weirdly disrespectful to the Union side, though, is it not? To just disappear them? It seems like a ludicrous amount of bending over backward to placate what are, after all, sore losers.
It’s just odd to elevate what were anti-American insurgents as somehow the “patriots”. There’s a flip side to that. It ignores the Union soldiers, who, um, WON.
Kylroy
@Inventor: George Henry Thomas should be one of the best known southerners in the Civil War. Lived through Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, sided with the Union despite his family disowning him, fought with distinction in the army.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’m reading a book about Grant and he didn’t have these divided loyalties. He says about Florida that the confederacy can’t have it because the United States paid for it, with blood. As opposed to the confederacy, who were not the United States so did not pay for it. I suppose that’s not very polite but he thought this was two countries at war. Is he wrong? Had they won it would have been two. The US and that other one.
MFA
@Amir Khalid:
Perhaps that would reduce the number of visitors. Darn.
catclub
@Kay:
I think one of the biggest offenders in insulting the Union side is the US Military.
From the Wiki:
he following United States military bases are named for soldiers who served in the military of the Confederate States of America.
Camp Beauregard near Pineville, Louisiana, named for Louisiana native and Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard[1]
Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia, named after Henry L. Benning, a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the Civil War[2][3]
Fort Bragg in North Carolina, named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg
Fort Gordon near Grovetown, Georgia, named in honor of John Brown Gordon, who was a major general in the Confederate army, a Georgia governor, a U.S. senator, and a businessman
Fort A.P. Hill near Bowling Green, Virginia, named for Virginia native and Confederate Lieutenant General A. P. Hill[4]
Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, named after Confederate General John Bell Hood who is best known for commanding the Texas Brigade during the American Civil War
Fort Lee in Prince George County, Virginia, named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee[5]
Fort Pickett near Blackstone, Virginia, named for the United States Army officer and Confederate General George Pickett
Fort Polk near Leesville, Louisiana, named in honor of the Right Reverend Leonidas Polk, the first Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana, and a distinguished Confederate General in the American Civil War
Fort Rucker in Dale County, Alabama, named for a Confederate General Edmund Rucker
make a start by changing those names to Union soldiers.
dww44
@jl: Along the lines of dating some of the memorials. Here’s a site where one can look up a historical marker in Georgia by county. I note that since 2018 the site isn’t being maintained.
And here’s a photo of one erected about the creation of DeKalb county itself. It’s located on the old courthouse square in Decatur that is currently used as an event venue for weddings and the like The sign was erected in 1955 by the State.
Since 1998 all of the markers are maintained by the Georgia Historical Society. And here’s a page that shows pics of a lot of them, including a monument on the State Capitol grounds, labeled “Expelled because of Color Statue”, a memorial to the black legislators who were expelled at the end of Reconstruction. Acknowledging, of course, that many of them are Civil War memorials to the Confederacy.
MFA
@Amir Khalid:
I gather some state legislatures are trying to prevent contextualization, too. Untested in court, AFAIK.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steve in the ATL:
And here’s a pic of it.
catclub
@dww44: Markers in Mississippi (goddam) that memorialize Emmett Till are routinely vandalized.
Kelly
Oh Hell Yes! This historical context may be better than removing the monument. I concur with all the calls for Union monuments Lincoln, Grant, Sherman any Union hero that fought a battle closest to the damned traitor monuments,
kindness
There are other less civilized ways to take statues down. Let us just hope that when those ways happen, no people get hurt.
dww44
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks for sharing. I’m frequently pleasantly surprised by the things one can learn from BJ commenters.
Aleta
lol
There’s a thought — proceed with designs to locate other memorials alongside that would throw the losers into deep shade. One in memory of the local safe house/transportation networks of those escaping slavery and one for the Union army. (I suppose adjacent monuments have been attempted somewhere?) Facing this ‘threat’ of free speech, the state might be pressed to allow war monuments to be moved to a museum.
Plan B
Invade. Occupation optional.
Major Major Major Major
chopper
@David Anderson:
i’m all for wide spread erections.
Major Major Major Major
JPL
@chopper: Long enough so they can step on their own dick..
redoubtagain
@Steve in the ATL: Yours truly was born and raised in a city with a Grant Park, a Sherman Park, a Sheridan Road and a Farragut High School. (And the license plates have always said, “Land of Lincoln.”)
Nicole
I like the putting up signs providing context idea. The American Museum of Natural History did it with the big diorama of Stuyvesant meeting the Lenape on the shores of Manhattan- they slapped stickers all over it, explaining the bias present in how the original diorama was constructed, and providing lots of information about what things were really like then. I ended up learning a lot more from the new presentation than I ever did from the old one, including how to look critically at these things. What really resonated with me was the explanation that the decision was made that just taking the diorama down would be an attempt to hide the problematic ways the Natural History Museum has dealt with our colonial history, rather than confronting it- that the diorama itself is a piece of history now, and should be viewed in context itself, as an attempt at whitewashing the past. They’re going to do the same with the redone Northwestern Pacific Hall- looking at the problematic ways they acquired some of the pieces now on display.
Aleta
@?BillinGlendaleCA: In our town is a statue of a soldier meant to symbolize those who fought the civil war. The story I heard was that after the war, towns south and north put up similar statues: the southern statues looking north and the northern ones looking south, and this was supposed to symbolize reunification. Now I wonder if that’s true. Did the ones in the north go up at the same time as the early 1900s tributes to white supremacy? Did a traveling monument salesman hustle his way through little towns in the north selling these monuments with a sentimental story of brothership with the south … (joking, but I should check it out). Anyway, some of the statues in Maine have been moved and then accidentally set up facing the wrong way. Staring at Canada.
TenguPhule
Laws no longer mean anything within the United States. Tear them down anyway.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
The same way our institutions got stomped by Trump and the GOP.
We followed the rules. They didn’t.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s gonna leave a mark in at least one segment I don’t need to name.
Go Liz!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Major Major Major Major: and it begins…
TenguPhule
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The war on definitions has begun.
Fair Economist
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You da man!
Eric NNY
@Aleta: Take your eyes off those shady Loyalists at your own peril…..
TenguPhule
And so it begins. JFC this is gonna be a real shit show with Trump.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Aleta: The one in Capitol Park was dedicated in 1897, so pretty close to the turn of the century. Here’s the explanation on the Capitol’s website(it’s under “Memorial Grove”).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Fair Economist: I take pictures.
(I was pretty sure I’d taken a picture of that when I was up there last year.)
TenguPhule
The lies are second nature to them now.
Cacti
Ezra Klein has a sad that Joe Biden is running on the Obama years, in contrast to certain rivals who carped about the beloved former POTUS not being left enough during his 8-years in office.
Boo hoo hoo.
TenguPhule
“Not the puppet! Not the puppet! You’re the puppet!”
TenguPhule
Our country has been taken over by a death cult.
tokyokie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
And what form of delegate manipulation could be more diabolical than offering a more appealing platform to voters?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TenguPhule: I suspect Kavanaugh wishes he wouldn’t keep amplifying this
JPL
@TenguPhule: He really is a jealous old coot, but it’s nice of him to give Obama’s documentaries free advertising..
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: someone was speculating that one of their docs could win an Oscar, which you know would drive The Beast crazy.
There were like three stories this past weekend about how he’s obsessed with Elton John, and was sulking because it wasn’t a headline that he outdrew Sir Reginald in New Hampshire
TenguPhule
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “Fuck em.”
Cacti
@JPL:
The Obamas are genuinely beloved and admired in a way that he and Melanie will never be, and it just burns him up inside.
FlipYrWhig
@TenguPhule: Trump’s plan clearly was, after losing the election, to make himself the loudest and hence richest critic of Pres. Hillary Clinton, and occasionally he remembers how much happier he’d be doing that than having to actually be the fucking President.
ET
Not only does this educate people about the real reason these monuments were put up in the first place, it also makes the state government look stupid. And it does so in a manner that is easy to understand with no ambiguity.
SWMBO
@David Anderson: How about statues of Dr. Martin Luther King?
Kelly
I’d like to add to every statue of kindly Bobby Lee an account of having his slaves whipped and salt water poured on their bleeding wounds.
cain
@Kent:
The interesting thing is – native Indians thought the idea of even owning land was wierd and strange. I think from their point of view they never had this concept and did not know what they were ceding. The encroaching white folks took full advantage of their naivete.
Noncarborundum
@David Anderson:
Okay, but watch out for this guy: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/115721198/man-who-cut-phallus-from-maori-carving-says-he-was-doing-gods-work
SiubhanDuinne
@Noncarborundum:
“We go strolling through the park
Goosing statues after dark,
If Sherman’s horse can take it, why can’t you?”
— Oscar Brand (I think)
rikyrah
@Cacti:
They really are mad that Biden isn’t running away from 44.
sukabi
@chris: here’s an article with twitter feed of the gerrymander as it happened.
sukabi
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: panic sets in as Warren grabs one of Bernie’s big FORMER endorsements.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/09/bernie-sanders-just-lost-an-important-progressive-endorsement-to-elizabeth-warren/
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wah wah wah. Shall we take bets on when Wilmer will have mathematically lost the primary?
Duane
@TenguPhule: If states want a fight over their monuments to slavery let them defend that in court for everyone to see. Take the damn things down one way or another.
A good fight to fight I think.
mrmoshpotato
@tokyokie:
And also beating Wilmer like a rented mule by ummmm…..5 million votes this time?
Roger Moore
@cain:
They may not have accepted the idea of individual ownership of land, but they clearly understood the idea of collective ownership. They built villages and fought territorial wars, which is not the kind of thing you do if you don’t accept some kind of ownership rights to land.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
More like the Working Neoliberals Party, amirite?
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Working Neoliberals Corporatist Shill Party
zhena gogolia
God, I wish the Bernie bros and Bernie himself would just disappear
Roger Moore
@zhena gogolia:
I don’t want Bernie and his bros to disappear. I just want them to stop whining and to vigorously support whomever the Democrats nominate.
Major Major Major Major
@mrmoshpotato: it’ll be fun to watch him lose but less fun to watch Biden take the nom due to Bernie’s refusal to drop out.
zhena gogolia
@Roger Moore:
My wish is more realistic.
Chyron HR
@Major Major Major Major:
“The Working Families Party endorsement of Warren is, not surprisingly, irritating some Sanders supporters.”
I love that Weigel can’t even imagine this statement being interpreted in any way other than, “it’s obviously rigged against Messiah!!!”
schrodingers_cat
More nonsense from Modi’s government, this time they want to foist Hindi as a link language on non-Hindi speakers.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
What’s a link language?
HalfAssedHomesteader
One town over from me. It is awesome.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Elevate Hindi’s stature over other languages (Marathi, Tamil, Bengali etc) as the language of the centre (federal government)
ETA: India has two 22 official languages.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Thanks for the explanation. So, another bad decision based in xenophobia.
joel hanes
@Steve in the ATL:
I’d never seen a Yankee Civil War monument before.
Most little county-seat Iowa towns have, or had, a statue in the town square park, with a plaque commemorating the specific units that included local men, or listing the local casualties in the war to stomp out slavery and preserve the Union.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: According to the RSS diversity is India’s weakness, it is something to be “cured”. Hindi is to be a bridge to the imposition of Sanskrit. Sangh has been green with envy about Israeli revival of Hebrew. They want to bring back a past that never existed except their own imagination.
MCA1
I was in favor of the grand spectacle of seeing these things fall (like at Chapel Hill a couple years ago) for a long time, but I eventually came to believe it’s a better collective history lesson to not just erase the Civil War and its aftermath, but rather present it more accurately for future generations. So I’m all in favor of this sort of contextualizing.
The only nagging concern I have is that it’s so dignified that it makes me feel childish about preferring to flank these Confederate statues with Grant or Sherman, their horses rearing up to trample someone, with simple inscriptions like “This guy whipped Confederate ass and helped Lincoln save the Union from the traitors memorialized by that other statue over there.” I’ll take the boldness of a plaque that actually uses “Lost Cause” being erected in Georgia, though. Because it is a sea change. I’m just not letting go of using “Confederate statues: the original participation trophy” at any opportunity.
And I’ll keep the dream alive that maybe someday, if enough Northerners keep fleeing the post-industrial high tax Midwest and changing the demographics of places like Virginia, we’ll get some Sheridan statues opposite Jubal Early and whatnot, as there are enough local residents whose families fought in the Union Army that they eventually reach parity with the dead enders. That would be cool.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: @joel hanes: Wisconsin has about 50.
J R in WV
@Kelly:
While I’m the last person to admire traitor R E Lee, who committed treason in support of slavery and was indeed a horrible racist who did beat his slaves, I think the point of the salt water over the wounds was to cleanse the wounds and avoid the death by infection of valuable working livestock.
This was before any medical science and way before any effective antibiotics. So salt water or alcohol was about it for wound treatment, and alcohol cost more than salt water. Not to lessen the horror of Robert E Lee’s slave ownership, he was horrible, treasonous, all that. Sadistic monster for sure.
joel hanes
@mrmoshpotato:
when Wilmer will have mathematically lost the primary?
It’ll be all over by the day after Super Tuesday, at the latest.
What he and his supporters choose to do then will determine how he’s remembered by history.
joel hanes
@schrodingers_cat:
They want to bring back a past that never existed except their own imagination.
And they’ve been corrupting archeology in India for at least a decade in an effort to wrench science and history into confirming their mythology.
nwerner
@jl: A great general and a great man. It would be a travesty to paint Longstreet with the same brush as many other Confederate generals.
schrodingers_cat
@joel hanes: Have you been following the latest debates about Indus Valley Civilization and the Steppe migrations.
ETA: Rewriting history is what they have done for the last 100 years. Earlier they could be ignored as a fringe group, no more.
KSinMA
@Steve in the ATL: I think there’s a Union monument in every little town in Massachusetts and upstate NY that I’ve ever been in. Some really little towns have soberingly long lists of soldiers who died.
J R in WV
Here in WV there were monuments to soldiers on both sides, sometimes the same monument, sometimes monuments at different graveyards on on the other side of the courthouse. I’m pretty sure I had ancestors fight on both sides.
AN interesting fact: Tennessee is known as the Volunteer State because more men volunteered for the Union Army from TN than would have been drafted had TN remained in the Union. It was overwhelmingly a Federal Union state in terms of the population as a whole, and particularly in the East Tennessee mountains.
NW Georgia, in the mountains, had county courthouses that flew the Union flag for the whole war. Sherman didn’t burn those towns.
The Treasonous South was not united at all, that’s all made-up hooey on the part of Jim Crow anti-reconstructionists. They had a draft as well as the Union did, and needed it at least as much as the Union did.
catclub
@J R in WV: Yes on salt water. Pouring salt into a wound is probably painful, but salt water, at about the same concentration as seawater – or blood, should be the opposite. I remember my eyes not stinging in saltwater versus chlorinated water.
jl
@nwerner: I bring up Longstreet from time to time, but reluctantly. I do it as evidence of the bad faith of the Confederate statue defenders, and southern heritage movement, and their nonsense that they want to preserve history and educate. They want to protect their dishonest version of history for political purposes. So, I think an example of their dishonesty is important. There were a few other Confederate generals who devoted themselves to the country during Reconstruction, they were ostracized and have been shunned by the statue movement up to this day.
But would be a mistake to make them stereotypical White heroes, and just replace the current statues with them. They have their place, and should be more statues of them in the South.
More important, I think, is that the country needs a lot more big bold statues celebrating and memorializing the end of slavery, the accomplishments of the early Reconstruction and the people who accomplished it at great risk, and statues memorializing the struggle against Jim Crow and segregation. Just checked Wiki article, and apparently a memorial to Tulsa race ‘riot’ (actually a modern pogrom) until 2010.
Dan B
My mother was a Daughter of the Confederacy, NW Arkansas born 1908. I have the framed certificate on a chest in a dressingroom. She talked about the war as the lost cause and the corrupt carpetbaggers that arrived after the war. She never talked about Reconstruction or Jim Crow. My mother supported the Civil Rights Movement and my father got us out of Arkansas because the racism horrified him. My mother did great things to welcome black people to our little Ohio town but there was always a reluctance to make actual friendships. I wonder how her childhood prejudices and evolution as an adult affected me but I feel weird in white neighborhoods. They feel suspicious to me. My old neighbirhood went from 30% black to 5%. It also went from 15% gay to 30% LGBT. Currently it’s 20% – a different form of gentrification. I wanted out. Our current neighborhood was 10% white with no change for a decade. Now it’s changing as homes in the rest of the city top a million.
Dan B
@Dan B: Most people assume our hood is high crime but it’s half the crime rate of most other neighborhoods. Ah racism…
Steeplejack
@Dan B:
What city?
ETA: It’s not doxxing yourself to give a little context. “Little Ohio town”? “Homes top a million”? Same place?
debbie
@Mike in NC:
They are among the groups pushing to have SPLC declared a hate group, if you can believe it.
debbie
@Aleta:
It would be better if all of them were labeled as participation trophies.
joel hanes
@schrodingers_cat:
Have you been following the latest debates about Indus Valley Civilization and the Steppe migrations.
Yes. And the earlier forced interpretation/political minding of various excavations to impose confirmation of the (the Itihasa?)
They’re going to end up walling themselves into a backwater of delusion, like American young-earth creationists, while the rest of the world continues with actual science.
David Hunt
@dmsilev:
The guy who posted the picture also posted a copy of the statute. It’s illegal to obscure the monument in addition to being illegal to remove it.
Zinsky
A-fucking-men!
JAFD
Good evening!
Was at a convention in Lancaster, Pa this summer. The new convention center is built around the former home and office building of Thaddeus Stevens
https://lancasteronline.com/news/historical-ties-proven-stevens-home-was-on-underground-railroad/article_ba110255-c07e-5d59-a33b-484bcaac9e82.html
https://www.lancasterhistory.org/places/stevens-smith/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_County_Convention_Center
with windows where visitors can see archaeologists digging up the basement.
Here in Newark there a statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting in front of the old courthouse, by Gutzon Borglum – he practiced here before moving to the Dakotahs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seated_Lincoln_(Borglum)
Generations of children have had their picture taken sitting in his lap.
In front of the new courthouse is statue of Rosa Parks, seated on bus.
https://www.nj.com/essex/2014/10/newark_home_to_states_first_rosa_parks_statue_officials_say.html
At some time this fall, plan to send Alain some pics of ‘Public Sculpture of Newark’…
Have great week, gentlefolk and jackals !
sm*t cl*de
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I especially enjoy the presidential tweets instructing Kavanaugh to sue for defamation… with the corollary that his failure to sue is an admission of guilt.
More, please!
moonbat
@nwerner: Longstreet sent men to their deaths in defense of a system founded on slavery for the purpose of preserving that system. Whatever his personal feelings about it may have been, he undeniably did that. That may make him tragic, but it does not make him admirable.