James Everett Kibler
Department of English
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
Please purchase and donate to libraries, high school and college students, and especially to the historically challenged.Here are sample sections from The Elements of Academic Success, Chapter VIII, "Papers and Writing:"
254. Read primary sources as often as possible when writing history papers.
Primary sources are the original documents from the past such as the Declaration of Independence, John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, the Magna Carta, Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, newspapers, government documents, the records of Congress, court records, etc. Also, the letters and diaries written by people in the past.
255. Secondary sources are interpretations of history by later scholars.
Some scholars are outstanding. Some are pathetic. A LOT are politically correct, interpreting history the way they need to interpret it to get tenure.
Make sure you know the reputation of historians you are reading. You need to know how credible they are, and their biases. Unless a historian is well known, do some research to see what other things he/she has published or is known for.
Do NOT rely on somebody else's interpretation of the past. Go to primary sources yourself. Read the letters, diaries and documents. Make up your own mind.
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.
Charleston Athenaeum Press
P.O. Box 13012
Charleston, SC 29422-3012
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Thursday, June 27, 2013
The most powerful academic guide ever published --- by SCV member Gene Kizer, Jr.
