No big deal, but my brother wrote this and Time picked it up for publication.
His book on Somersett and how Ben Franklin engineered a revolution comes out tomorrow. :)
aeneas
5569
And today I learned something new about US history. Your brother writes well.
Jerk is a really good surgeon too. :)
But thanks!
RichVR
5571
Damn. Can the rest of us have some skills too? :)
RichVR
5573
I was talking about you too. Probably your whole damn family. Is your mom an astrophysicist? Maybe your dad designs nuclear reactors? :)
None
5574
He dual-classed a successful surgeon and writer? Did he skimp on luck to get that many skill points to spend?
RichVR
5575
Maybe charisma was his dump stat?
Heh. He’s within a few years of retirement as a surgeon, his kids are all grownups who are out of college and have their own careers now, so a few years ago he started taking up research and writing because he’s a history nerd and it was a fun way to engage in that hobby.
So cool! Fascinating read… really eye-opening. And I love that Time picked it up. It’s exciting to think there’s an audience eager to educate themselves on some of the Black history we didn’t get in school.
We watched The Hate U Give with our daughters this evening. We all loved it and had a really great talk afterwards. This whole homestretch of the Trump presidency already feels like the light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel… and by “tunnel” I mean “having a white supremacist for a President.”
(Also, it’s a tunnel inside another tunnel and that tunnel is Covid, but we’ll come the fuck outta that too!)
None
5578
In the video, a woman sitting on the tailgate of a truck with a Confederate flag attached and wearing a camouflage Make America Great Again cap gets into a heated confrontation with a Black Lives Matter demonstrator.
The woman, who told the News-Leader her name is Kathy Bennett of Branson, stood up and shouted to the demonstrators, “I will teach my grandkids to hate you all.”
Then she said “suck on this” and shrouded herself with a Confederate flag. Bennett then turned around, made a fist, and said, “KKK belief.”
I hope Kathy Bennett’s grandkids have interracial relationships resulting in beautiful multiracial babies that cause her grief and shame for being the person she once was.
This is a nice piece, thanks. Congrats to your brother on his upcoming book!
An overhead drone shot of the Lee Monument in Richmond:
I honestly wish they’d take some of these Confederate statues and put them in a Civil Rights museum, complete with the dates they were put up (almost invariably in the 60’s) and a full discussion of what the Daughters of the Confederacy were really trying to accomplish by doing so (spoiler alert, it wasn’t about history). There’s one hell of an object lesson here about using history as a bludgeon, I’d hate for it to get lost.
Thrag
5583
The only statue removal I disagree with is the Jefferson Davis one. Rather than remove it, it should just have been attired in a dress to commemorate his condition upon capture. They could change the dresses up periodically. Have a holiday on the day of his capture and make a kind of Guy Fawkes day thing of it.
I think most were put up between the 1900s and 1920s during the first wave of lost causism. Not to take away from your larger point.
Fair point, there were two waves and both were at particular moments in history where the motivations for doing this bear discussion and illumination.
CHAZ/CHOP is getting shut down after a weekend of shootings and first responder difficulties.
