Superfreak said:

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My favorite series on the history channel is the men who built America. So many interesting stories and tidbits in there I never knew. Maybe relay some of those stories.

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Jabin said:

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Superfreak said:

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My favorite series on the history channel is the men who built America. So many interesting stories and tidbits in there I never knew. Maybe relay some of those stories.

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Uh, he's teaching from 1865 on.

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one safe place said:

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The Great Depression for one. My dad ran away from home when he was 11, right into that period of time. Another would be the Dust Bowl. Though I was aware of it, and knew more than a little about it, I have recently done some reading and found out there was a lot more that I didn't know!

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Quote:

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Framing Reconstruction as America's first (failed) experiment in nation building

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jwoodmd said:

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aalan94 said:

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Quote:

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Framing Reconstruction as America's first (failed) experiment in nation building

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At first I thought negatively about this comment, not for the comment, but for some of the historical baggage. I think a lot of Southern revisionist history portrayed Reconstruction as worse than it was. It was bad, but the real reason life sucked in the South after the war was their economy was destroyed, their labor system was essentially made illegal without anything structural to replace it (where was the cash to pay the newly-freed slaves?) But reconstruction didn't really add all these new evils to the ones that were there. At least not to the degree that it is often seen.

But on second thought, as far as nation building, you have a point. Think of the South as Afghanistan. Essentially, the US tried to change it, then gave up and pulled out and it reverted (though to a slighly less oppressive system than it was before, unlike Afghanistan). I would caveat that not all US nationbuilding has been a failure. The Philippines is actually a pretty good case. Yes, it's poor and backward in some ways, but not as much as you would expect (I've been there twice). And I think you could easily make the case that they would be far more backward if they were still owned by Spain, had gained independence without the US influence, or even worse, had Japan been able to keep them as a dependency.

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Japan is a great case of successful nation building. Unlike Germany, the US was the only player in reconstructing and refocusing the Japanese after WW2.

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p_bubel said:

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When talking to my friends who generally don't care about history like I do, clear cause and effect is the best way to get them interested in the story I'm telling. Humor helps greatly too. Individual dates and the minutia of battle tactics just makes their eyes glaze over.

Mine too, at times.

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Ghost of Andrew Eaton said:

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jwoodmd said:

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aalan94 said:

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Quote:

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Framing Reconstruction as America's first (failed) experiment in nation building

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At first I thought negatively about this comment, not for the comment, but for some of the historical baggage. I think a lot of Southern revisionist history portrayed Reconstruction as worse than it was. It was bad, but the real reason life sucked in the South after the war was their economy was destroyed, their labor system was essentially made illegal without anything structural to replace it (where was the cash to pay the newly-freed slaves?) But reconstruction didn't really add all these new evils to the ones that were there. At least not to the degree that it is often seen.

But on second thought, as far as nation building, you have a point. Think of the South as Afghanistan. Essentially, the US tried to change it, then gave up and pulled out and it reverted (though to a slighly less oppressive system than it was before, unlike Afghanistan). I would caveat that not all US nationbuilding has been a failure. The Philippines is actually a pretty good case. Yes, it's poor and backward in some ways, but not as much as you would expect (I've been there twice). And I think you could easily make the case that they would be far more backward if they were still owned by Spain, had gained independence without the US influence, or even worse, had Japan been able to keep them as a dependency.

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Japan is a great case of successful nation building. Unlike Germany, the US was the only player in reconstructing and refocusing the Japanese after WW2.

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Germany is a good example if you look at the disparities that exist today between the areas that were West Germany and East Germany.

Are there significant differences between the different sectors of West Germany?

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gigemhilo said:

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one safe place said:

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The Great Depression for one. My dad ran away from home when he was 11, right into that period of time. Another would be the Dust Bowl. Though I was aware of it, and knew more than a little about it, I have recently done some reading and found out there was a lot more that I didn't know!

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I think it would be interesting to explore just how much of current culture was a result of the desperation of the Great Depression - examples: my grandparents ate weird foods, saved butter containers and used them like tuber-ware, and had a big meat meal on Sunday but very little the rest of the week. How have habits like these trickled down to us 100 years later? How has language and phrases from that period trickled down to our culture today?

Maybe it's a rural thing, but I have often thought about how their suffering changed culture at the time.

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one safe place said:

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gigemhilo said:

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one safe place said:

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The Great Depression for one. My dad ran away from home when he was 11, right into that period of time. Another would be the Dust Bowl. Though I was aware of it, and knew more than a little about it, I have recently done some reading and found out there was a lot more that I didn't know!

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I think it would be interesting to explore just how much of current culture was a result of the desperation of the Great Depression - examples: my grandparents ate weird foods, saved butter containers and used them like tuber-ware, and had a big meat meal on Sunday but very little the rest of the week. How have habits like these trickled down to us 100 years later? How has language and phrases from that period trickled down to our culture today?

Maybe it's a rural thing, but I have often thought about how their suffering changed culture at the time.

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Really good points and I think the same as you on this. My dad didn't, but I knew people of his generation (I worked where he did for a few years prior to going to A&M) who saved the aluminum foil they wrapped their sandwich in, to use over and over again.

My dad lived in a tent for about three years. Going into the Marines (other than having the Japanese trying to kill him) was probably the best living conditions he had experienced, particularly with regard to food, clothing, and shelter.

We seldom bought meat, we would butcher a steer, a couple of hogs, we fished, shrimped, crabbed, and oystered. We had a decent sized garden we ate from. All done to save money and I think due to him having gone through the Depression.

I grew up lower middle class, but we never went hungry. My dad had experienced real hunger. And though we ate leftovers, we still threw a lot of food away. When he made gumbo, he made five gallons of it, for a family of five. When we would go to the deer lease, he filled his tags as quickly as he could, or shot one or two deer to get something in the coolers, so he could start preparing food for those in camp.

As to sayings, I am not sure where or when he picked it up, but dad used to say "we were so poor we didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out." He would also say "poor people have poor ways" (when talking about his family growing up, or ours, he was not condemning poor people). When he said either, my mom would get so pissed off, lol.

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gigemhilo said:

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one safe place said:

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The Great Depression for one. My dad ran away from home when he was 11, right into that period of time. Another would be the Dust Bowl. Though I was aware of it, and knew more than a little about it, I have recently done some reading and found out there was a lot more that I didn't know!

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I think it would be interesting to explore just how much of current culture was a result of the desperation of the Great Depression - examples: my grandparents ate weird foods, saved butter containers and used them like tuber-ware, and had a big meat meal on Sunday but very little the rest of the week. How have habits like these trickled down to us 100 years later? How has language and phrases from that period trickled down to our culture today?

Maybe it's a rural thing, but I have often thought about how their suffering changed culture at the time.

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Quote:

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Yet another approach to a broader contextualization of postwar history would be to focus on a crucial issue, such as the massive population movements in the wake of Nazi defeat. Though they were causally related to the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Hitler's quest for living space, most of the literature treats them as separate processes. Monographs on displaced persons largely focus on the fate of Jewish survivors and the question of repatriation of Slavic slave laborers or their emigration to the United States, Canada, or Australia. These studies also look at the laudable efforts of UNRRA to help the surviving victims of Nazi aggression, but tend to slight the fate of the collaborators from the East. In contrast, the German scholarship on flight and expulsion deals with the partly voluntary and largely compulsory eviction of 12 million German speakers from eastern Europe, focusing on actions of the German authorities without paying enough attention to the causes of their displacement. At the same time, Polish studies on the westward shift of millions from their eastern territories into formerly German lands also tend to remain within a national framework, even if both processes are related in the emptying out and repopulation of the same territories. Instead of searching for culprits, it would be more constructive to treat all these processes and various groups as historically related to one another

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