Dr. Blight's Civil War class on UA-cam is Amazing. I recommend anyone who wants to get a real understanding of the American Civil war to watch all his lectures.
Yes, it might take me a week to get through one episode. I rewind to where I drifted off. I can also recommend a series put out by a female prof on the revolutionary war. Yale courses. I was not surprised that she was later a consultant for Hamilton.
Dr. Blight was "Mr. Blight" when he was my Civil War High School teacher in 1977-78 at Flint Northern High School. He was, of course, the MOST popular teacher at school, and it was his last year teaching High School, as he went on the earn his PhD and move-on to his Collegiate Career and Author of Books.... A young "Mr. Blight" had a beard and taught like 'John Keating' of Dead Poets Society fame... He would turn off the lights and gave amazing war 'reenactments' and attributed his passion to his belief that he actually lived and experienced the Civil War in a previous life... Something that probably is not known, as he has learned to 'Tone-Down' his truth and 'Stay Between the Lines"... Anyway, he was, like many students would agree, my #1 High School Teacher... And his annual 'Gettysburg Field Trip' was a MUST... for it still is etched in my mind..... It is an amazing memory..!!
I’m up to the 11th lecture, the secession of the Deep South. The most illuminating thing is how the history of the previous 20 years set the table for the war. I had already learned about most of the elements and had learned vaguely that they were “among the causes”, but exactly how they all related to the mood and the politics was murky to me. Like a good rug, professor Blight really ties the history together.
The ancient soldier on the Charleston Confederate memorial David Blight showed is Greek. That round shied was a Greek, being specifically the "hoplon" which gave us the word "hoplite" commonly used for ancient Greek spear-armed soldiers.
Having watched his Yale lectures and several lectures at events such as these, I noticed he often plays dumb like this - a pastime my personal professors loved to employ to keep us wondering and promote our own intellectual curiosity so that the search for truth and knowledge continues. I could be wrong, but something I just began picking up on.
Blight somehow overlooks the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson, whose hatred for Imperialism was coupled with a disdain for American blacks. Hence black soldiers role in this war for democracy was reduced to something only marginally better than that of the slaves who served their masters in the Confederate army. Perhaps in memory of the huge numbers of freed slaves Mr. Lincoln incorporated into the Union Army. and who were a necessary eventually for the Union victory.
Lincoln was NOT the "Great Emancipator" that most people believe he is... He campaigned for President of the USA on a platform that supported the Southern States Rights for maintaining Slavery, and only wanted to restrict future States from deciding "Free or Slave"... This was an attempt to appease the South to avoid succession. He only won the election because the Southern Democrats split their vote. Lincoln won win zero Southern States, which was why the South decided to leave the Union. His 'Gettysburg Address" came at the end of the Civil War, as a tactical attempt to encourage slaves to join the Northern Army, as many northern boys were becoming very reluctant to joining this horrid and bloody war. Lincoln supported sending slaves back to Africa (Liberia) as well as to establishing a slave colony in Panama, to dig the canal that was needed. In my opinion, he should have allowed the CSA to leave the Union peacefully, avoided this tragic war, and focused on a 'Political Solution' that would have reunited the two countries after resolving the issues of 'Slavery & States Rights'...
Fantastic indeed. Nice to hear American thinking about statues. Here in Finland we have similar issues, not so hot, but issues anyhow. For example early 1980's some Soviet city gave a statue "world peace" to Helsinki. Now it is next to large market square near central Helsinki. Statue is pure sosialitic realism. Should it be there or not? I am leaning to let it be, but debate is interesting.
"Count them happy, for they endured a great fight." I'm reading "happy" in the old sense of the word, of being "fortunate." Think Shakespeare's Henry V: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." I wonder if the inscription is invoking this sense of the word, and if Dr. Blight has this in mind here as he discusses this statue.
Beth Graham cant say. more than likely youre reading too much into it. Whos happy? Seems nobody. Bunch of racist enslaved africans, lost a war that killed 600,000+ , now have audacity to bemoan the fact that most of the country doesnt want to celebrate the racist losers , tolerate their ongoing hate for the people they brought here in the 1st place or suffer the debate over 1st amendment rights. Ingrates.
The South is a distinct culture in America. The north has monuments to Lenin and Sherman, but the South doesn't demand their destruction. They begrudge it. They bristle at the mention of it, but in the end they don't demand its destruction because those Yankees are entitled to their own regional heroes. For some reason, the South is not entitled to its own heroes, its own history, its own culture. A foreign pressure and vandalism from out of state students tare down their monuments, cheered on by the rest of the country and they are simply supposed to bow down and take it. Like the speaker says: "A little humility." I've known many a southerner who has sympathy for the Yankee cause because 4% of the South owned slaves, but every non-southerner I've met uses slavery (like yourself) to say "F those cousin lovers!" While the North freed slaves, they would also go on to enslave immigrants for another fifty years to their factory overlords. People are entitled to their own history, their own memories without some son of a bitch strolling into town and shitting all over their monuments.
@@mustbtrouble 1st amendment is great. The Democrats who ran the Confederacy didn't like free speech any more than Democrats today. Guess some things don't change.
Thank you Dr. Blight I disagree on one point. " Let's teach 6th graders to have nightmares", is a very good idea. The alternative is that without a cold-eyed look at history, our fellow citizens will choose a dream of the past that informs waking nightmares in the present for the rest of us. Our history curricula are contested, particularly in mass secondary education and at historical sites. They are contested because political decision in the present depend heavily upon a "memory" of the past that has to do mainly with how the future "ought" to be. The Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian and now these Confederate monuments are classics of the type.
I hear you (lol) the volume on this on is ok, but there have been some other seminars in which Prof Blight has spoken that the volume levels were very weak... still, he's such a compelling speaker that i'll usually suffer through low volume.
chris dennehy that's the problem! He really does have an ear candy voice and is very knowledgeable. there's even a video with him and another guy and the other guy is super load almost yelling compared to David :(((
😂🤣 THIS!! OMG you're so right!! I love this guy & have been binging his talks, but 95% of them I have to turn my volume to like 50.🤣 & I still miss things.
Southern symbols and the lost Cause. I can understand the effects the literature could have on peoples. I would question how far down would that affect go in society. The well educated elite yes. Teachers academics yes. Historians and their students yes. The general public no. The vast majority of people reading about the Civil War are interested in the military aspects and that’s what they read about. The whys and wherefores of the results not so much. I would also say for the common man what you’re actually fighting for is not a conscious thing it’s the immediate thing at hand. Survival, self-respect, others perception or whatever makes you feel good about what you’re doing. Fighting to keep their slaves. Big conversation i’m not about to get into. But let’s turn the coin over. What was the north fighting for? Considering slavery was still on the table until January 1863 I would say they were fighting to maintain the union. Not so much a slave liberation Army.
How about this principle for statues and naming buildings: don't use people. Don't glorify individuals. It only creates a cult of personality on the one side, and a target for that person's failings the other. Put up monuments to events and milestones, not the people who made them happen. Save that for the museums and for history.
Today is July 2020, which means George Floyd was recently killed, and a pandemic is occurring... How does this video only have 12,534 views? You would think Yale grads alone...
You are confusing imagination with memory, which is a classic tendency in the era of electrical mass communication since both interior senses are constructed out of phantasmé. But the "memory booms" of the age of electrical communication since the Civil War are primarily imagination presented as memory, and nearly all of them are tainted by the "uniformity principle fallacy" that the present is somehow the key to the past. The problem with this is that under its influence nothing in the past makes sense, and more significantly nothing in the present actually does either. While it may have an explanation, the explanation can't make sense.
17:50 "every monument means what it meant when it was unveiled" from the same man who defended historians' being revisionists. "Every historian is a revisionist," yet every statue is somehow fixed in its meaning. Why? Bit of a double standard.
He goes on to say that they have renewed meanings. The idea being when people defend these monuments in political discourse they renew that political legacy. That’s doubling down on the installation
why do you twist what this very subtle man says so that it sounds like he's a simpleton? Apparently the subtleties are lost on you. No offence. Most of us these days are not up to much nuance in our thinking.
There were many northern 'Yankees' that did not hate the South... Michigan was an 'Agricultural State', and like many northern states, was split on the issue of slavery, but politically forced to take the 'Northern-Side'... The Civil War was actually a power struggle between the New England States, that had 'Domestic Slaves' and the Southern States, that had 'Plantation Slaves'. Remember, George Washington owned some 350 slaves, and inherited 16 slaves from his father when he was just 12 years old. Jefferson, and most of our 'Founding Fathers' owned slaves... By the 1860's it was considered an 'Unfair Advantage' for southern states compete with the north using slave labor, but permissible for the northern states to own servants, nurses, cooks, maids, etc... The 'Midwestern States' had no choice but to side with the North, so many left and joined the CSA and the fight for independence from New England. They reluctantly joined the American Revolution, on the guarantee that they could secede, and then got double-crossed, because they didn't get that promise in writing.
Dr. Blight's Civil War class on UA-cam is Amazing. I recommend anyone who wants to get a real understanding of the American Civil war to watch all his lectures.
Should be a must watch for all Americans.
@@Future_Senior_Kitizen I've read a lot of books on the Civil War, but I learned more form watching those videos.
@@chrismcdevitt7814 He is a cranky national treasure. I think I'm on episode 21. I listen to them at night before falling asleep.
@@Future_Senior_Kitizen Great Stuff ! His voice must be great to put you to sleep because he never gets excited.
Yes, it might take me a week to get through one episode. I rewind to where I drifted off. I can also recommend a series put out by a female prof on the revolutionary war. Yale courses. I was not surprised that she was later a consultant for Hamilton.
David Blight is a genuinely compelling lecturer.
He sounds a lot like Harrison Ford. It's like hearing a lecture from Indiana Jones, though Dr. Jones was not a Yale professor.
YES! I thought I was the only one who heard this!!!
Glad I'm not the only who hears it.
I thought I was the only one as well!
I hear a little H.S.T myself.
Yes.
Dr. Blight was "Mr. Blight" when he was my Civil War High School teacher in 1977-78 at Flint Northern High School. He was, of course, the MOST popular teacher at school, and it was his last year teaching High School, as he went on the earn his PhD and move-on to his Collegiate Career and Author of Books.... A young "Mr. Blight" had a beard and taught like 'John Keating' of Dead Poets Society fame... He would turn off the lights and gave amazing war 'reenactments' and attributed his passion to his belief that he actually lived and experienced the Civil War in a previous life... Something that probably is not known, as he has learned to 'Tone-Down' his truth and 'Stay Between the Lines"... Anyway, he was, like many students would agree, my #1 High School Teacher... And his annual 'Gettysburg Field Trip' was a MUST... for it still is etched in my mind..... It is an amazing memory..!!
Only discovered Dr. Blight today! A really fine speaker.
This talk is full of wisdom. Bravo, Professor Blight. Can't wait to read your book. Thank you for posting.
Just finished the Civil War course on UA-cam. Better than any “must see” series that I watched this past year on Netflix.
Try reading a book and you will realize how utterly false his thinking is . Hes a dip shit with a degree.
Fantastic academic. Would give him time... any time.
I’m up to the 11th lecture, the secession of the Deep South. The most illuminating thing is how the history of the previous 20 years set the table for the war. I had already learned about most of the elements and had learned vaguely that they were “among the causes”, but exactly how they all related to the mood and the politics was murky to me.
Like a good rug, professor Blight really ties the history together.
I hope you finished. The latter part of the lectures surrounding Reconstruction is fantastic.
Captivating from the beginning..
Amen, good Dr. you are the good Dr.
This man just needs a god damn medal for real
A true minstrel of the ages
I need to be great like this man
@@davidblight5825 hahahaha
The sound is too low
The conservative Christian right-wing will put pants on that statue.
Then blame it on a non-cis minority and blame them for taking your money and rising costs
The ancient soldier on the Charleston Confederate memorial David Blight showed is Greek. That round shied was a Greek, being specifically the "hoplon" which gave us the word "hoplite" commonly used for ancient Greek spear-armed soldiers.
Having watched his Yale lectures and several lectures at events such as these, I noticed he often plays dumb like this - a pastime my personal professors loved to employ to keep us wondering and promote our own intellectual curiosity so that the search for truth and knowledge continues. I could be wrong, but something I just began picking up on.
Blight somehow overlooks the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson, whose hatred for Imperialism was coupled with a disdain for American blacks. Hence black soldiers role in this war for democracy was reduced to something only marginally better than that of the slaves who served their masters in the Confederate army. Perhaps in memory of the huge numbers of freed slaves Mr. Lincoln incorporated into the Union Army. and who were a necessary eventually for the Union victory.
Lincoln was NOT the "Great Emancipator" that most people believe he is... He campaigned for President of the USA on a platform that supported the Southern States Rights for maintaining Slavery, and only wanted to restrict future States from deciding "Free or Slave"... This was an attempt to appease the South to avoid succession. He only won the election because the Southern Democrats split their vote. Lincoln won win zero Southern States, which was why the South decided to leave the Union. His 'Gettysburg Address" came at the end of the Civil War, as a tactical attempt to encourage slaves to join the Northern Army, as many northern boys were becoming very reluctant to joining this horrid and bloody war. Lincoln supported sending slaves back to Africa (Liberia) as well as to establishing a slave colony in Panama, to dig the canal that was needed. In my opinion, he should have allowed the CSA to leave the Union peacefully, avoided this tragic war, and focused on a 'Political Solution' that would have reunited the two countries after resolving the issues of 'Slavery & States Rights'...
Fantastic indeed. Nice to hear American thinking about statues. Here in Finland we have similar issues, not so hot, but issues anyhow. For example early 1980's some Soviet city gave a statue "world peace" to Helsinki. Now it is next to large market square near central Helsinki. Statue is pure sosialitic realism. Should it be there or not? I am leaning to let it be, but debate is interesting.
"Count them happy, for they endured a great fight." I'm reading "happy" in the old sense of the word, of being "fortunate." Think Shakespeare's Henry V: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." I wonder if the inscription is invoking this sense of the word, and if Dr. Blight has this in mind here as he discusses this statue.
Beth Graham cant say. more than likely youre reading too much into it. Whos happy? Seems nobody. Bunch of racist enslaved africans, lost a war that killed 600,000+ , now have audacity to bemoan the fact that most of the country doesnt want to celebrate the racist losers , tolerate their ongoing hate for the people they brought here in the 1st place or suffer the debate over 1st amendment rights. Ingrates.
The South is a distinct culture in America. The north has monuments to Lenin and Sherman, but the South doesn't demand their destruction. They begrudge it. They bristle at the mention of it, but in the end they don't demand its destruction because those Yankees are entitled to their own regional heroes. For some reason, the South is not entitled to its own heroes, its own history, its own culture. A foreign pressure and vandalism from out of state students tare down their monuments, cheered on by the rest of the country and they are simply supposed to bow down and take it. Like the speaker says: "A little humility." I've known many a southerner who has sympathy for the Yankee cause because 4% of the South owned slaves, but every non-southerner I've met uses slavery (like yourself) to say "F those cousin lovers!" While the North freed slaves, they would also go on to enslave immigrants for another fifty years to their factory overlords. People are entitled to their own history, their own memories without some son of a bitch strolling into town and shitting all over their monuments.
@@mustbtrouble Northerners brought the Africans here to be slaves. My God, this country is full of idiots!
@@mustbtrouble 1st amendment is great. The Democrats who ran the Confederacy didn't like free speech any more than Democrats today. Guess some things don't change.
@@zsedcftglkjh If rhe shoe was on the other foot how would you feel? Heroes?
Thank you Dr. Blight I disagree on one point. " Let's teach 6th graders to have nightmares", is a very good idea. The alternative is that without a cold-eyed look at history, our fellow citizens will choose a dream of the past that informs waking nightmares in the present for the rest of us.
Our history curricula are contested, particularly in mass secondary education and at historical sites. They are contested because political decision in the present depend heavily upon a "memory" of the past that has to do mainly with how the future "ought" to be.
The Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian and now these Confederate monuments are classics of the type.
I can't hear any video this guy is in...
Consult an ENT specialist?
chris dennehy it's the volume...
I hear you (lol) the volume on this on is ok, but there have been some other seminars in which Prof Blight has spoken that the volume levels were very weak... still, he's such a compelling speaker that i'll usually suffer through low volume.
chris dennehy that's the problem! He really does have an ear candy voice and is very knowledgeable. there's even a video with him and another guy and the other guy is super load almost yelling compared to David :(((
😂🤣 THIS!!
OMG you're so right!! I love this guy & have been binging his talks, but 95% of them I have to turn my volume to like 50.🤣 & I still miss things.
Southern symbols and the lost Cause.
I can understand the effects the literature could have on peoples. I would question how far down would that affect go in society.
The well educated elite yes. Teachers academics yes. Historians and their students yes. The general public no.
The vast majority of people reading about the Civil War are interested in the military aspects and that’s what they read about. The whys and wherefores of the results not so much.
I would also say for the common man what you’re actually fighting for is not a conscious thing it’s the immediate thing at hand. Survival, self-respect, others perception or whatever makes you feel good about what you’re doing.
Fighting to keep their slaves.
Big conversation i’m not about to get into.
But let’s turn the coin over. What was the north fighting for? Considering slavery was still on the table until January 1863 I would say they were fighting to maintain the union. Not so much a slave liberation Army.
How about this principle for statues and naming buildings: don't use people. Don't glorify individuals. It only creates a cult of personality on the one side, and a target for that person's failings the other. Put up monuments to events and milestones, not the people who made them happen. Save that for the museums and for history.
Today is July 2020, which means George Floyd was recently killed, and a pandemic is occurring... How does this video only have 12,534 views? You would think Yale grads alone...
Roman Shields were square.
The scutum was rectangular.
You are confusing imagination with memory, which is a classic tendency in the era of electrical mass communication since both interior senses are constructed out of phantasmé. But the "memory booms" of the age of electrical communication since the Civil War are primarily imagination presented as memory, and nearly all of them are tainted by the "uniformity principle fallacy" that the present is somehow the key to the past. The problem with this is that under its influence nothing in the past makes sense, and more significantly nothing in the present actually does either. While it may have an explanation, the explanation can't make sense.
Loved reading this and want to know more about the concept. Can you recommend any books?
Does anyone know the title of the report he's referencing
1:40 need for humility
Opposite of iconoclasm: idolatry.
17:50 "every monument means what it meant when it was unveiled" from the same man who defended historians' being revisionists. "Every historian is a revisionist," yet every statue is somehow fixed in its meaning. Why? Bit of a double standard.
He goes on to say that they have renewed meanings. The idea being when people defend these monuments in political discourse they renew that political legacy. That’s doubling down on the installation
why do you twist what this very subtle man says so that it sounds like he's a simpleton? Apparently the subtleties are lost on you. No offence. Most of us these days are not up to much nuance in our thinking.
a Yankee that hates the South and loves to hear himself talk
Y’all were the villains in that war…
There were many northern 'Yankees' that did not hate the South... Michigan was an 'Agricultural State', and like many northern states, was split on the issue of slavery, but politically forced to take the 'Northern-Side'... The Civil War was actually a power struggle between the New England States, that had 'Domestic Slaves' and the Southern States, that had 'Plantation Slaves'. Remember, George Washington owned some 350 slaves, and inherited 16 slaves from his father when he was just 12 years old. Jefferson, and most of our 'Founding Fathers' owned slaves... By the 1860's it was considered an 'Unfair Advantage' for southern states compete with the north using slave labor, but permissible for the northern states to own servants, nurses, cooks, maids, etc... The 'Midwestern States' had no choice but to side with the North, so many left and joined the CSA and the fight for independence from New England. They reluctantly joined the American Revolution, on the guarantee that they could secede, and then got double-crossed, because they didn't get that promise in writing.
Ew
That Ft. Sumter statue is audaciously perverse-pfft. _"DEFENDING"_ smh
Animal Farm, too, because of his pig resemblance.