| Merry Christmas! I am proud to announce three things: The publication of the most powerful academic self-help book this year - The Elements of Academic Success, How to Graduate Magna Cum Laude from College - and it is PRO-South, which really means pro-truth. Parents and grandparents of college and high school students, click on the cover, below, and see it on Amazon. The first 10% is available as a sample. Further down in this e-mail is another sample demonstrating how NOT-politically-correct it is. It is 232 pages of academic dynamite and student empowerment, and it can be given as a gift. Just click the "Give as Gift" button on the right side of the page on Amazon. There will be a softcover printed edition out by the end of December.  The second thing is LOTS of Christmas Specials on www.BonnieBluePublishing.com! Almost every Southern History and Literature DVD is substantially discounted for the holidays including a Buy-One-Get-One-FREE on the two-DVD set on black Confederates featuring Professor Edward C. Smith.  The third thing: Holiday Specials on www.WorldHistory101-102.com. Here's a sample DVD. Click it to go to website where the complete set of all 80 World History 101 and 102 DVDs was $498 but is now, $388!  Also want to offer my services for eBook formatting and production. I can take your manuscript and turn it into a beautiful eBook in NO time, on Amazon for worldwide sales. My charge is usually somewhere between $195 and $395. Please see www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com for details. If any camp or chapter has something they want to make available for sale on Amazon as an eBook, let me know and I'll do the best I can on a price!
Sample from The Elements of Academic Success.
There are 10 chapters and 351 enumerated topic sections. Here are #256 through #264
from Chapter VIII, "Papers and Writing"
256.
Be aware of the scourge of political correctness
on scholarship and free speech.
Since
the rise of political correctness, many events of
the past are interpreted according to the latest
political fashion instead of the standards that
existed at the time.
This
is kin to another scourge, advocacy journalism, in
which some "journalists" apply their morals, or
lack thereof, to the news, and report on it that
way rather than giving us the impartial facts. This
is another reason why Americans hold the press in
such low esteem these days.
Political
correctness makes history little more than
propaganda, just as advocacy journalism turns the
front page into the editorial page.
257.
You can not possibly understand history by using
today's standards to judge the past.
You
HAVE to look at the past the way the people who
lived in the past looked at it. That's how you
understand the past.
258.
Political correctness is ignorance and leads to a
total lack of historical understanding.
You can't define the past by snippets of acceptable history here and there.
For
example, the South gets beat up all the time for
slavery but most slave traders were New Englanders
who made huge fortunes in the process. An argument
can be made that the entire infrastructure of the
Old North was built on profits from slave traders
such as Boston's Peter Faneuil of Faneuil Hall
fame. That's why most Northerners had NO problem
with slavery. Less than 5% were abolitionists, and
ironically, many abolitionists didn't like slavery
because they didn't like blacks and did not want to
associate with them.
One
such person was Rep. David Wilmot, Democrat from
Pennsylvania. Wilmot sponsored the Wilmot Proviso
to keep slavery out of the West, though his real
goal was to keep blacks out of the West, and he
admitted it. Abraham Lincoln also said, in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates,
that he wanted the West reserved for white people
from all over the earth. No blacks allowed.
While
many say that slavery was the cause of the War
Between the States, Abraham Lincoln said it was
not. Before the war, Lincoln favored the first 13th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would
have left black people in slavery FOREVER, even
beyond the reach of Congress. That Amendment passed
in the Northern Congress after Southerners
seceded, and was ratified by some Northern States
before the war began and made it moot.
There are breaths of fresh air here and there such as the 2005 book Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).
History
is always more complex than the self-moralizing,
politically correct want you to believe.
259.
Southern history as it is taught today is a
"cultural and political atrocity," and students
are being CHEATED.
Esteemed
historian, Eugene D. Genovese, who passed away
September 26, 2012, was disgusted with the way
Southern history is taught today. He writes:
To
speak positively about any part of this Southern
tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and
an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity---an
increasingly successful campaign by the media and
an academic elite to strip young white Southerners,
and arguably black Southerners as well, of their
heritage, and therefor, their identity. They are
being taught to forget their forebears or to
remember them with shame. (my emphasis). Eugene D.
Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The
Achievement and Limitations of an American
Conservatism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi-xii.
A
perfect example is William Gilmore Simms.
According to Edgar Allan Poe, Simms was the
greatest American writer of the 19th century. Simms
wrote 82 book-length works including 20 that are
very important in American history and literature.
He understood the publishing industry of that era
better than anybody and wrote about it. He
chronicled American westward expansion when Alabama
was the edge of the West; and his Revolutionary
War novels, set in and around Charleston, are
exciting, vivid history as it happened. Simms was a
nationally recognized expert on the Revolution. He
wrote dramatic, historically accurate scenes of
when the British conquered Charleston and marched
in, and when they lost the war and marched out, and
everything in between. Simms also knew the local
Indians extremely well and much of what is known
about them is in his work, including their
languages. There is a bust of William Gilmore Simms
in White Point Gardens at The Battery in
Charleston, high up on a beautiful pedestal.
But Simms is not studied because he was a slaveholder.
260. Young students of History and literature should examine everything.
Don't
assume the War Between the States was about
slavery when the economy of the North collapsed
into near-anarchy as the Southern States seceded.
The Northern economy was dependent on manufacturing
and selling to its captive Southern market, and
without the South, Northern factories stood idle.
The
South, on the other hand, seceded and was ecstatic
at finally having control of its own economy.
Southerners had always wanted free trade and
immediately wrote into their constitution a
prohibition on protective tariffs.
The
North, at the same time, passed the astronomical
Morrill Tariff, which made goods entering the North
40% to 70% higher. This was aimed at Southerners,
as all the antebellum tariffs had been, so European
goods would be too costly for Southerners to
afford and they would have to buy from the North at
higher prices.
But
with the South out of the Union, Southerners were
no longer obligated to pay Northern tariffs, and
suddenly, much-sought-after Europeans goods were
far less expensive for Southerners than Northern
goods.
261.
Those historians with a vested interest in
maintaining that slavery caused the war, are not
telling you the truth, and they are cheating you
out of understanding much of American history.
Economic
factors were HUGE in 1861 just as they are today.
The collapse of the Northern economy, alone, was
enough for Abraham Lincoln to want war.
Just
look at our own era. We have been quite willing to
go to war to maintain the free flow of oil from
the Middle East because a disruption of the oil
supply means economic hardship, even collapse. Gas
prices would soar and cause the price of everything
else to jump off the scale. Business would grind
to a halt. People would lose their jobs and not
have money to feed their families. They would be
angry and in the street.
You
can imagine what would happen if supplies of oil
to the United States were cut off abruptly and
completely! Fortunately, that would never happen
because we would go to war to prevent it. We have.
But,
"abruptly" and "completely" is exactly what
happened to the North when the South seceded and
the Northern Congress passed the Morrill Tariff.
Instantly, it would cost the rest of the world 40%
to 70% more to do business with the North, so
NOBODY wanted to.
The
rest of the world was beating a path to the South,
where protective tariffs were unconstitutional and
where there was a huge market for goods, and that
market was wealthy because it controlled King
Cotton, which had been 60% of U.S. exports alone in
1861.
The
North had shot itself in the leg with the Morrill
Tariff - actually, it had shot itself in the head.
Northern greed and mismanagement made the economic
destruction of the North inevitable, and Northern
leaders were in a panic.
Don't
take my word for it. Read the words of ALL
Northern newspaper editors after January, 1861,
when it became apparent that the North needed the
South, but the South did not need the North.
Northern editors were not thinking about slavery.
They were thinking about their own wealth and
economy, and they were all petrified. War was
preferable for them just as the disruption of oil
made war preferable for us.
An excellent two-volume book makes Northern newspaper editors easy to study: Northern Editorials on Secession,
a 1964 reprint edited by Dr. Howard Cecil Perkins,
Volumes I and II, published by Peter Smith,
Gloucester, Massachusetts. Northern Editorials on Secession was originally published in 1942 by the American Historical Association.
262.
Another major issue was unfair taxation -
British taxes were a huge issue in 1776 but were
MINUSCULE compared to what the South was paying
in 1861.
For Southerners, 1861 was 1776 all over.
Southerners
were paying 3/4ths of the Federal Government's
taxes, but 3/4ths of the tax money was being spent
in the North. Robert Toombs famously called it a
suction pump sucking wealth out of the South and
depositing it in the North.
The
level of "taxation without representation" that
led to the Revolutionary War was miniscule compared
to what the South was suffering prior to seceding.
The
point is that politically correct historians who
tell you that it is cut and dried that slavery
caused the War Between the States, are being
dishonest and many are lazy because they have not
been required, by vigorous academic debate, to look
into other issues - especially economics. Many
don't understand economics, and why should they
bother. It is too easy for them to play up slavery
and call anyone who disagrees a racist.
However,
we have fought two Gulf Wars in our own times to
guarantee the free flow of oil because a disruption
would cause an economic meltdown and untold
problems. No government is willing to risk that,
because history has shown us that an economic
collapse will get out of control and lead to a
collapse of the government itself, and anarchy. War
is preferable.
It's true today and it was true in 1861.
So, look deeply into the entire picture and assume nothing.
263. Be a scholar.
Read
primary sources. Read the words of the people of
the past, their speeches, newspapers, diaries, laws
and documents. Pay attention to secondary sources
from historians you trust, and give no credence to
those you don't. That's fair and responsible. In
your writing, debunk the scholars you disagree
with, and tell why they are wrong.
264. Write what you want.
Don't
let political correctness chill free speech and
intimidate you into not writing on a topic that
interests you. Talk to your professor. The best
professors will encourage you.
And
if one discourages you, find a way around him/her
by approaching the topic from a different angle. If
he/she brings up some historian who goes against
your conclusions, then YOU bring up two who support
them. History should always be a vigorous debate.
Do
exhaustive research and a thoughtful analysis and
document everything properly. Argue with power,
vigor, confidence, clearly and persuasively. Do NOT
use today's standards, or lack thereof, to judge
the people of the past. Understand how the people
of the past viewed their lives and times, and what
their standards were, and why.
That's what real scholarship is about.
Thank You!
Magna est veritas et praevalebit
(Great is truth and it will prevail)
Gene Kizer, Jr., Publisher
P.O. Box 13012
Charleston, SC 29422-3012
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you do not want to receive any other e-mails,
please reply back with "Remove" in the subject line
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|
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
The Elements of Academic Success treats the South fairly
