coolshannie
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I finished my final paper for english a few days ago and I've been changing things and reading it over and having others read it over, but the more people that read it and catch things the better! If you have any suggestions, if something is unclear, or if you see something that is a grammatical error I would really appreciate it. 
The paper is about the Southern lifestyle during the time during and directly after the Civil War and how views have been shaped over time.
***** I've been playing around with my thesis statement and so far this is what I have come up with. Please let me know if this makes what I am talking about clearly stated, if I am on the right track and need to go further, or if I need to start from scratch with the Thesis. I think I'm getting there with what I've written, but I'd really love some input.
Thesis: Americans are currently taught that the southern lifestyle during the time of the Civil War was immoral and something to be disgraced, but this view has been shaped over time and is the perception of specific historians. Whereas, the look into the Southern lifestyle has been looked at through different viewpoints throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Depending on the time period, knowledge a person has on the given subject, and who the person is that is viewing the facts; perception can lead to a new outlook on how the facts are viewed, which is what Jane Tompkins was explaining in her “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History.” ******
Americans are taught that the southern life during the time of the Civil War was immoral and something to be disgraced, but is that really the entire story? Slavery may have been immoral, but who is to say that their entire lives consisted upon their keeping of slaves as their way of life? What someone has been told is the truth and what actually is the truth are two entirely different things. As in Jane Tompkins’ “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” she questions our acceptance of factual evidence throughout her entire essay through her example of Indians, who she once had her own beliefs about as a child, which were soon changed by the facts of historians, authors, and documentation. This led Tompkins to question if anything truly was a fact or just information altered by the individuals’ perception. By the end of the essay she finds that “…the subject of debate has changed from the question of what happened in a particular instance to the question of how knowledge is arrived at” (Tompkins 646-663). She finds that facts are still truthful, but seen in a different light depending on information the person already knew as to what they were basing their opinions that shaped the facts. Applying this to the southern way of life during the Civil War; information that people are familiar with about this subject could be only partially true because it has been written by a historian who never personally lived in that way of life. The facts that are presented about slavery or their lives may be the same, but if you look at how views in our society have changed over time, whites from that time period, and blacks from that time period, there are going to be many different views on the same set of information.
History books describe an image on the period around the time of the Civil War as being immoral on the part of the Southerners in the United States. This seems to be a very one-sided, society based image that has been created over years of shaping the facts from that time period. Tompkins makes a similar argument in that she grows up being taught the same repetitive things about Indians and how they were intruding on what the colonists were trying to establish in America, but really that was the one-sided argument that was being shaped through facts that had been worded in ways to support the way the society was living in that present time. In either case the facts are still facts; it is just deciding what can be believed through the words that surround those facts.
Journal entries from the Civil War were collected in the book The Lasting South, which contained views from Southern white men on what was happening to their beloved land during the war. The Lasting South states, “to the antebellum Southerner the journey of his life was everything, and he loved with a fierce immediacy every detail of the land on which his journey was made” (Louis 29). This view describes people who are not looking towards the outcome of how much money they could make after their slaves had picked the cotton fields or what slaves they should invest their money in, but how to enjoy each day that was given for them to live and how they could enjoy it to the fullest. This view is the complete opposite of what is taught currently in schools in the United States; students are not taught about the lives of Southerners beyond the facts that they housed slaves and worked them tirelessly and immorally on plantations. No teacher, history book, or educational video ever tells the student how important the day-to-day life was to the Southerner, instead it is made for students to believe that Southerners only care about the profit and outcome that came from the act of using slave labor. The same set of facts are laid out for the world to view, but they are portrayed so differently just as in Tompkins the views on Indians were completely different if one was looking at a view from colonists or the Indians themselves. Now looking at a Southerner’s take on the facts, which is that everything wonderful about a slower life that was all about the journey one chose to take is gone, leaving them with the fast paced life that the north had become accustomed too, this is clearly a different take on the facts.
Gone with the Wind is discussed in the Southern Literary Journal to describe the South during the Civil War. The view that stands throughout the book and is explained through the essay is that the South was a place like no other. The main character of the story does not want to lose her childhood home that was at one time a plantation. To her there was nothing wrong with the way the South lived, because there was no place like it in the entire world. A quote from Gone With the Wind discussed in the essay states, “Her love for this land with its softly rolling hills of bright red soil, this beautiful red earth that was blood colored, garnet, brick dust, vermilion, which so miraculously grew green bushes starred with white puffs, was one part of Scarlett which did not change when all else was changing. Nowhere else in the world was there land like this” (Gelfant 16). This quote describes the beauty of what is the south. The journal goes on to explain how the beauty of the South was being devoured by the forest, being taken over by the war, and that what she knew as her life was being drained away. There was no place on earth with the defining features of the South had that the quote discussed. Only in the South were there rolling hills of red cotton fields, the only way of life Southerners knew was being taken away, something that was being sucked away through the war. The essay goes on to say “…The South's ordered world was gone and a brutal world had taken its place, a world wherein every standard, every value had changed. The characters who have adjusted their lives to historical change deny its irreversibility” (Gelfant 18). This takes the description of losing the landscape a step further and applies it to the fact that part of the beauty of the South was not just in the way it looked, but was also in the way they lived. Cotton fields and with it slavery was all that they knew and it was being taken away from them in an instant. Everything they thought was right and everything they had ever learned was being taken away right down to what made the South a Southerner’s home. The author of this journal describing Gone With the Wind shows the view of the Southerner that has lost all they had ever known; and shows the view of someone who has lost their lifestyle rather than the North gaining moral justice.
The Lasting South and Gone With the Wind have a take on the South that is similar in that they both look towards the landscape and a slower way of life. They both discuss a lifestyle rather than the immoral aspects of the time period. Each book discusses how a Southerner lived and what they had to lose; which was their entire life. This perspective is very interesting in that currently the South is not viewed for what their lives looked like and what their landscape was around them, but for the immoral slavery that they kept intact. The views showing through the eyes of a Southerner may be completely tainted towards their views on their life and how they lived, but it is a view that is completely absent from present day society.
In 1948 “The Dispossessed” was written on the views of the South, one of its main focuses being on the era directly following the time of the Civil War and the equal sharing of poverty between both races. “Poverty has a history. Out of the devastation of the Civil War emerged a class of landless Southern families that picked the cotton that fueled the South’s economic recovery”(Jones 2). The quote goes on to talk about the fact that these Southerners who worked the fields were those of both races. This view shows that the white men were not standing around while the black men worked just as they were before the war, but they were working alongside each other to rebuild the South that had collapsed. This view differs completely from that of today’s view that has been portrayed as the white men standing back and paying the black men next to nothing. This 1948 view does not talk about the North ordering those of the South as to what they needed to do in order to reshape their part of the nation into the model that the North had created through industrialization. Instead, this view during 1948 shows honest work to bring back some of the Southern qualities of life by working side by side. It also shows that the white men were struggling just as much as those who were formerly enslaved because they had lost their entire way of life and everything that made the South the South.
The best example of using facts to shape a conception of a time period that is completely false is through the movie “Song of the South.” This movie depicts the time directly after the Civil War, reconstruction, which was still a portion of time in which those of different races in the south were said to be living far from peacefully. When students are taught in schools that white men kept African Americans as slaves, how else would they think the time period after a war against slavery would be; the time period is anything but pretty in the reality that the facts are presented in school. In “Song of the South” on the other hand, this time period is shown through those who are black and those who are white living in complete happiness and bliss, side by side. The way this movie portrayed the “facts” of the reconstruction era was so unsettling that the NAACP stepped in and gave a statement on their thoughts about the movie. ‘‘It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the North or South, the production helps perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, Song of the South unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts” (Sperb 31). This is a huge deal because the Disney company released a movie that showed that there really was nothing of significance that was negative being portrayed during the time period directly after the Civil War. This movie was showing the audience that the relationships between the slave owners of the South and the slaves themselves was not horrible at all, but a pleasant way to live together in peace. This perspective on reconstruction was twisted so far away from the facts of the time period and it unsettled the public so much, by the Disney company ignoring what was actually going on in that time period that the movie was supposed to be banned. This however, did not happen; instead it was re-released two times after it’s initial release in 1946, releasing again in 1980, and 1986. This is a vast period of time, but even so, every time the movie was played there was controversy over the portrayal of African Americans being happy with the living situation of being a slave of a white slave owner of the south. For this radical view on slavery there was no change in the public opinion from the late 1940s through the late 1980s as those in the NAACP continued to fight that the movie downplayed what truly occurred and the public agreed. It shows that the facts of that time period were there, but they were portrayed so differently and in such a light that idealized that time, that nobody could truly say they believed what Disney was trying to pass off to the public in order to save themselves from having to show a movie that showed either the South version of the facts or the North version of the facts.
When Reviews in American History was written in 1974 it was addressed that during that time the Southerners during the Civil War were seen as the “other Americans” rather than apart of the United States. This view is similar to what has been taught in schools presently and even if this was not the views when the NAACP was fighting against the showing of Song of the South it was still believed that what slave owners of the south were doing to African Americans was immoral, separating that their view of the South from their view of the North. This idea that the South was at the very least immoral and should be depicted as such was shown through the controversy that stirred each time Song of the South was released from 1946 through 1986, so this view that the South had been portrayed as a separate region rather than apart of the United States is not really a far leap from what was being taught. “There has been much distortion in the thinking and writing about the South, McWhiney insists, because a variety of myths have been buttressed by uncritical rationalizations. To correct this situation he seeks to explode specific myths and to emphasize the fact that the South has always shared fully in such national values as capitalism and economic and social mobility” (Bertelson 39). The views of the 1970’s were much like today, but McWhiney points out that those views were and still are construed. Instead of acknowledging that Southerners had many of the same beliefs that Northerners had, the only focus given to the time period of the Civil War is that they believed in slavery and that was so immorally wrong that there was nothing else that needed to be examined. He further explained that Southerners and Northerners were of the same people with the same values, basically stating that at the end of the day they were fighting themselves, because truly they were no different from each other if one put aside the argument over slavery. Then and now people are given the argument that slavery was wrong, but they are never given the values that the South and the North shared or the lifestyle that the South lived by.
There is a current view accepted of the South during the time of the Civil War that centers around the facts that are given of that time period, but through the views of decades earlier it is clear that the facts can be shaped to portray something else entirely; which is exactly what Tompkins was portraying through her essay about Indians. Depending on how the facts were shaped, the time period in which they were discussed, and who was giving their opinion, the views on the Southern lifestyle during the Civil War seemed to change drastically. From the late 1800s through the late 1980s views changed from looking at the South through a Southerner’s eyes showing the family values and importance and pride of their home and day-to-day life to complete hatred of the South for their immoral keeping of slaves making them something to be ashamed of, something that could not even be idealized without be criticized.
Thanks again!
The paper is about the Southern lifestyle during the time during and directly after the Civil War and how views have been shaped over time. ***** I've been playing around with my thesis statement and so far this is what I have come up with. Please let me know if this makes what I am talking about clearly stated, if I am on the right track and need to go further, or if I need to start from scratch with the Thesis. I think I'm getting there with what I've written, but I'd really love some input.
Thesis: Americans are currently taught that the southern lifestyle during the time of the Civil War was immoral and something to be disgraced, but this view has been shaped over time and is the perception of specific historians. Whereas, the look into the Southern lifestyle has been looked at through different viewpoints throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Depending on the time period, knowledge a person has on the given subject, and who the person is that is viewing the facts; perception can lead to a new outlook on how the facts are viewed, which is what Jane Tompkins was explaining in her “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History.” ******
Americans are taught that the southern life during the time of the Civil War was immoral and something to be disgraced, but is that really the entire story? Slavery may have been immoral, but who is to say that their entire lives consisted upon their keeping of slaves as their way of life? What someone has been told is the truth and what actually is the truth are two entirely different things. As in Jane Tompkins’ “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” she questions our acceptance of factual evidence throughout her entire essay through her example of Indians, who she once had her own beliefs about as a child, which were soon changed by the facts of historians, authors, and documentation. This led Tompkins to question if anything truly was a fact or just information altered by the individuals’ perception. By the end of the essay she finds that “…the subject of debate has changed from the question of what happened in a particular instance to the question of how knowledge is arrived at” (Tompkins 646-663). She finds that facts are still truthful, but seen in a different light depending on information the person already knew as to what they were basing their opinions that shaped the facts. Applying this to the southern way of life during the Civil War; information that people are familiar with about this subject could be only partially true because it has been written by a historian who never personally lived in that way of life. The facts that are presented about slavery or their lives may be the same, but if you look at how views in our society have changed over time, whites from that time period, and blacks from that time period, there are going to be many different views on the same set of information.
History books describe an image on the period around the time of the Civil War as being immoral on the part of the Southerners in the United States. This seems to be a very one-sided, society based image that has been created over years of shaping the facts from that time period. Tompkins makes a similar argument in that she grows up being taught the same repetitive things about Indians and how they were intruding on what the colonists were trying to establish in America, but really that was the one-sided argument that was being shaped through facts that had been worded in ways to support the way the society was living in that present time. In either case the facts are still facts; it is just deciding what can be believed through the words that surround those facts.
Journal entries from the Civil War were collected in the book The Lasting South, which contained views from Southern white men on what was happening to their beloved land during the war. The Lasting South states, “to the antebellum Southerner the journey of his life was everything, and he loved with a fierce immediacy every detail of the land on which his journey was made” (Louis 29). This view describes people who are not looking towards the outcome of how much money they could make after their slaves had picked the cotton fields or what slaves they should invest their money in, but how to enjoy each day that was given for them to live and how they could enjoy it to the fullest. This view is the complete opposite of what is taught currently in schools in the United States; students are not taught about the lives of Southerners beyond the facts that they housed slaves and worked them tirelessly and immorally on plantations. No teacher, history book, or educational video ever tells the student how important the day-to-day life was to the Southerner, instead it is made for students to believe that Southerners only care about the profit and outcome that came from the act of using slave labor. The same set of facts are laid out for the world to view, but they are portrayed so differently just as in Tompkins the views on Indians were completely different if one was looking at a view from colonists or the Indians themselves. Now looking at a Southerner’s take on the facts, which is that everything wonderful about a slower life that was all about the journey one chose to take is gone, leaving them with the fast paced life that the north had become accustomed too, this is clearly a different take on the facts.
Gone with the Wind is discussed in the Southern Literary Journal to describe the South during the Civil War. The view that stands throughout the book and is explained through the essay is that the South was a place like no other. The main character of the story does not want to lose her childhood home that was at one time a plantation. To her there was nothing wrong with the way the South lived, because there was no place like it in the entire world. A quote from Gone With the Wind discussed in the essay states, “Her love for this land with its softly rolling hills of bright red soil, this beautiful red earth that was blood colored, garnet, brick dust, vermilion, which so miraculously grew green bushes starred with white puffs, was one part of Scarlett which did not change when all else was changing. Nowhere else in the world was there land like this” (Gelfant 16). This quote describes the beauty of what is the south. The journal goes on to explain how the beauty of the South was being devoured by the forest, being taken over by the war, and that what she knew as her life was being drained away. There was no place on earth with the defining features of the South had that the quote discussed. Only in the South were there rolling hills of red cotton fields, the only way of life Southerners knew was being taken away, something that was being sucked away through the war. The essay goes on to say “…The South's ordered world was gone and a brutal world had taken its place, a world wherein every standard, every value had changed. The characters who have adjusted their lives to historical change deny its irreversibility” (Gelfant 18). This takes the description of losing the landscape a step further and applies it to the fact that part of the beauty of the South was not just in the way it looked, but was also in the way they lived. Cotton fields and with it slavery was all that they knew and it was being taken away from them in an instant. Everything they thought was right and everything they had ever learned was being taken away right down to what made the South a Southerner’s home. The author of this journal describing Gone With the Wind shows the view of the Southerner that has lost all they had ever known; and shows the view of someone who has lost their lifestyle rather than the North gaining moral justice.
The Lasting South and Gone With the Wind have a take on the South that is similar in that they both look towards the landscape and a slower way of life. They both discuss a lifestyle rather than the immoral aspects of the time period. Each book discusses how a Southerner lived and what they had to lose; which was their entire life. This perspective is very interesting in that currently the South is not viewed for what their lives looked like and what their landscape was around them, but for the immoral slavery that they kept intact. The views showing through the eyes of a Southerner may be completely tainted towards their views on their life and how they lived, but it is a view that is completely absent from present day society.
In 1948 “The Dispossessed” was written on the views of the South, one of its main focuses being on the era directly following the time of the Civil War and the equal sharing of poverty between both races. “Poverty has a history. Out of the devastation of the Civil War emerged a class of landless Southern families that picked the cotton that fueled the South’s economic recovery”(Jones 2). The quote goes on to talk about the fact that these Southerners who worked the fields were those of both races. This view shows that the white men were not standing around while the black men worked just as they were before the war, but they were working alongside each other to rebuild the South that had collapsed. This view differs completely from that of today’s view that has been portrayed as the white men standing back and paying the black men next to nothing. This 1948 view does not talk about the North ordering those of the South as to what they needed to do in order to reshape their part of the nation into the model that the North had created through industrialization. Instead, this view during 1948 shows honest work to bring back some of the Southern qualities of life by working side by side. It also shows that the white men were struggling just as much as those who were formerly enslaved because they had lost their entire way of life and everything that made the South the South.
The best example of using facts to shape a conception of a time period that is completely false is through the movie “Song of the South.” This movie depicts the time directly after the Civil War, reconstruction, which was still a portion of time in which those of different races in the south were said to be living far from peacefully. When students are taught in schools that white men kept African Americans as slaves, how else would they think the time period after a war against slavery would be; the time period is anything but pretty in the reality that the facts are presented in school. In “Song of the South” on the other hand, this time period is shown through those who are black and those who are white living in complete happiness and bliss, side by side. The way this movie portrayed the “facts” of the reconstruction era was so unsettling that the NAACP stepped in and gave a statement on their thoughts about the movie. ‘‘It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the North or South, the production helps perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, Song of the South unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts” (Sperb 31). This is a huge deal because the Disney company released a movie that showed that there really was nothing of significance that was negative being portrayed during the time period directly after the Civil War. This movie was showing the audience that the relationships between the slave owners of the South and the slaves themselves was not horrible at all, but a pleasant way to live together in peace. This perspective on reconstruction was twisted so far away from the facts of the time period and it unsettled the public so much, by the Disney company ignoring what was actually going on in that time period that the movie was supposed to be banned. This however, did not happen; instead it was re-released two times after it’s initial release in 1946, releasing again in 1980, and 1986. This is a vast period of time, but even so, every time the movie was played there was controversy over the portrayal of African Americans being happy with the living situation of being a slave of a white slave owner of the south. For this radical view on slavery there was no change in the public opinion from the late 1940s through the late 1980s as those in the NAACP continued to fight that the movie downplayed what truly occurred and the public agreed. It shows that the facts of that time period were there, but they were portrayed so differently and in such a light that idealized that time, that nobody could truly say they believed what Disney was trying to pass off to the public in order to save themselves from having to show a movie that showed either the South version of the facts or the North version of the facts.
When Reviews in American History was written in 1974 it was addressed that during that time the Southerners during the Civil War were seen as the “other Americans” rather than apart of the United States. This view is similar to what has been taught in schools presently and even if this was not the views when the NAACP was fighting against the showing of Song of the South it was still believed that what slave owners of the south were doing to African Americans was immoral, separating that their view of the South from their view of the North. This idea that the South was at the very least immoral and should be depicted as such was shown through the controversy that stirred each time Song of the South was released from 1946 through 1986, so this view that the South had been portrayed as a separate region rather than apart of the United States is not really a far leap from what was being taught. “There has been much distortion in the thinking and writing about the South, McWhiney insists, because a variety of myths have been buttressed by uncritical rationalizations. To correct this situation he seeks to explode specific myths and to emphasize the fact that the South has always shared fully in such national values as capitalism and economic and social mobility” (Bertelson 39). The views of the 1970’s were much like today, but McWhiney points out that those views were and still are construed. Instead of acknowledging that Southerners had many of the same beliefs that Northerners had, the only focus given to the time period of the Civil War is that they believed in slavery and that was so immorally wrong that there was nothing else that needed to be examined. He further explained that Southerners and Northerners were of the same people with the same values, basically stating that at the end of the day they were fighting themselves, because truly they were no different from each other if one put aside the argument over slavery. Then and now people are given the argument that slavery was wrong, but they are never given the values that the South and the North shared or the lifestyle that the South lived by.
There is a current view accepted of the South during the time of the Civil War that centers around the facts that are given of that time period, but through the views of decades earlier it is clear that the facts can be shaped to portray something else entirely; which is exactly what Tompkins was portraying through her essay about Indians. Depending on how the facts were shaped, the time period in which they were discussed, and who was giving their opinion, the views on the Southern lifestyle during the Civil War seemed to change drastically. From the late 1800s through the late 1980s views changed from looking at the South through a Southerner’s eyes showing the family values and importance and pride of their home and day-to-day life to complete hatred of the South for their immoral keeping of slaves making them something to be ashamed of, something that could not even be idealized without be criticized.
Thanks again!
because there is no white space for relief.
but I'll help where I can.
