Confederate History Month / Identity

[burgunder]

Confederate History Month, often celebrated in April in the South, is so outside of my childhood and adult experience that I had to look up what CHM even stood for when I read this article that Kris sent me:

Commemorating CHM: "They Too Needed Emancipation" by Ta-Nehisi CoatesI grew up in Kansas, which may now have a reputation as an ultra-

Comments

[gkr]

Lots of Seattle neighborhoods prohibited blacks from owning or living within their confines except as servants.

[burgunder]

"except as servants". o.0

I had recently learned that Wyoming was the first to receive women's suffrage and that it was because they had to count the women as people or they wouldn't have enough people to qualify to become a state. However, I can't find any evidence supporting that via Google now that I'm poking around. Do you know more about that?

[gkr]

I knew that Wyoming was the first. I had not heard it was because they needed more official bodies. I do not have any information on it, but I am skeptical. They were granted suffrage in Wyoming Territory in 1869, but statehood came 21 years later in 1890. In addition, for decades the census counted women and slaves, counts which were used for allocating number of votes in Congress, but not for allowing the vote. (Because, of course, the white men who did the voting knew best and could take women and slaves needs into account better than those people could themselves.)

[vaxhacker]

Sounds like the opposite of what happened to Utah. They gave women suffrage when they were a frontier settlement, decades before statehood (although #2 behind Wyoming), but the US made them rescind suffrage out of fear they'd have too much voice in the region.

[evillinn]

The impact of history, and specifically of familial history has been on my mind a lot over the last few years. Its something I think we need to study further, and think about further, as I believe it is the key to fundamentally addressing some of societies most painful problems.

I met a woman not long ago that is doing her doctoral thesis on the idea that white Americans focus on their ancestral lineage as a means of mourning the truth in white American history. Needless to say, it was more complex than that, but I found the idea compelling.

[evillinn]

also, I replied to your post, and just opened the article. I have to take someone to the airport momentarily, but am eager to get back to finish reading it.

[geekalpha]

Coincidentally, I was just going to do a post on Confederate history month. The quick summary is, being from The South, the story I learned was that slavery was entirely incidental and the war was really about state's rights. Interestingly, I had never ever been introduced to the Confederate Constitution or any of the state's Reasons of Secession documents. Turns out that the principal state's right they were interested in, was the right to own people, demand that other states recognize that right and return escaped slaves, and the right to make new territories fellow slave territories

[varn_ix]

The waitress at High Fidelity on Bourke St is half-Indian, half-Chinese.

*happy sigh*

Hooray for mixed-race children.