Historians Question Trump's Comments on Confederate Monuments - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...shington-thomas-jefferson.html
trump monument history confederacy racism white supremacy
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There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it.
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The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”“This is not about the personality of an individual and his or her flaws,” she said. “This is about men who organized a system of government to maintain a system of slavery and to destroy the American union.”
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Mr. Trump’s comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting.When you alter monuments, “you’re not changing history,” he said. “You’re changing how we remember history.”
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“We would not want to whitewash our history by pretending that Jim Crow and disenfranchisement or massive resistance to the civil rights movement never happened,” he said. “That is the part of our history that these monuments testify to.”
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“The amazing thing is that the president is doing more to endanger historical monuments than most of the protesters,” he said. “The alt-right is producing a world where there is more pressure to remove monuments, rather than less.”