In an
article posted at the Washington Post. James W. Loewen, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of
Vermont, is the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and "The Confederate
and Neo-Confederate Reader." posits:
- With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what
the Confederacy was about, and our army honoring its generals, no
wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until last week. We
can literally see the impact Confederate symbols and thinking had on
Dylann Roof, but other examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh,
who bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a
neo-Confederate T-shirt
showing Abraham Lincoln and the words, “Sic semper tyrannis!” When
white students in Appleton, Wis., a recovering sundown town that for
decades had been “all white” on purpose, had issues with Mexican
American students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags,
which they already had at home, at the ready. Across the country,
removing slavery from its central role in prompting the Civil War
marginalizes African Americans and makes us all stupid.
After the break is a response criticizing some of James Loewen's work and suggest that even though Lowen's critiques everything scholarly about history, that his work his not "scholarly" of nature.
