How little were people paying attention back in high school history class?

I was a student of history while in college; my Bachelor of Arts degree is with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy and much of the reading I have done during the three decades since I last was a tuition-paying student is of history and biography.
 

What would U.Penn history profs say of Trump vacuousness

I feel like I spent four years of college taking courses in subjects that interested me, and that I have continued to learn on my own. I probably will keep doing so until the day I drop dead – and someone’s going to have a heck of a time weeding through the personal library I’ve accumulated throughout the years.

I REALIZE I am the exception. Many people haven’t taken the time to study history any farther than they did during that mandatory U.S. history course they took in high school – where I remember one of my old classmates saying history would be okay if we could study cool stuff, like the 1960s.

They only remember a few generic concepts, and probably forgot most of the details. Which is something I’m sure that President Donald J. Trump counts on every time he opens his mouth.

I don’t think the one-time economics student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business deliberately lies about historic facts whenever he tries to use them to emphasize his politically partisan spin on issues.

I think it’s more likely that Trump truly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and would be much less likely to embarrass himself if he didn’t try to make historic allusions.

BECAUSE THEY’RE THE kind of thing that can come back to haunt you, even though he tries to dismiss those who catch him as being smart-aleck, know-it-alls, and who really cares what they think?!?

Trump, most recently, stirred up a mess when he talked about how former President Andrew Jackson could have averted the nation feeling the need to split and go to war with itself.

Not taking into account how Jackson was dead before the Civil War began in 1861.

 

Would Jackson think Trump a part of the problem?

Jackson used to be a favorite image of Democrats for his rhetoric about the “common man,” and the need to fight against a “corrupt aristocracy.” But he also was a slaveholder, and any serious look at how the man would have come down on the issue of Civil War, slavery and abolitionism would conclude that a “President Jackson” would have wanted to preserve the “peculiar institution” at all costs.

I DOUBT THAT Trump is seriously supporting the idea of slavery. I just think he hasn’t thought it through before shooting his mouth off.

Besides, I can’t help but think that Jackson would have viewed people with the wealth of Trump as being the “corrupt aristocracy” that IS THE PROBLEM our society faces.

Maybe a Jackson-like political person would be leading the fight to allow us all to see the Trump income tax returns so that we can all see for ourselves just how financially UNLIKE all of us The Donald truly is?

I think a lot of Trump’s problem is that he probably wasn’t paying much attention as a prep school student during history class when they talked about the Civil War’s causes,

ALTHOUGH PERSONALLY I think that the simplest explanation I ever heard of that war’s cause came from Shelby Foote, the Greenville, Miss.-native who wrote a three-volume series of books about the war and also was a prominent face in that now 27-year-old documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns.

 

I wonder if GOPers now ashamed of Lincoln

Foote, on video, said that one of the great strengths of U.S. democracy is our ability to reach compromise on just about any issue. But that in the case of slavery, we failed – which led to bloodshed.

Which is a fact I keep in mind whenever the modern-day partisan rhetoric is boosted up a notch or two – things could be worse. We don’t have Southern good ol’ boys taking up arms against the United States and all it stands for.

Even though I’m sure many of them were amongst the 46 percent of voters who last year created the Electoral College majority that put Trump into the Oval Office and gets more and more riled up every time the man misspeaks with historic fact.

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PAWAR: Visiting all 102 counties w/ 'New Deal'

EDITOR'S NOTE: Illinois gubernatorial hopeful Ameya Pawar likes to make references to the "New Deal," the grand plan by which former President Franklin D. Roosevelt got the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although his references are usually vague enough that he doesn't make factual errors that would harm his campaign's slim chances of achieving victory.

150 years and counting; what have we learned from Civil War tales?

It may wind up being the most over-quoted statement in coming days, but the view of a Confederate commander upon his surrender at Appomattox in Virginia is a thought that continues to have relevance.

Attributed at times to Henry Wise (and at others to an unknown Confederate soldier), it was the thought that there exists a serious split in the view of North and South – one that will never truly wither away.

“YOU MAY FORGIVE us, but we won’t be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts which you little dream of. We hate you, Sir,” was supposedly said to U.S. general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain when he oversaw ceremonies in which those Rebel soldiers laid down their arms before going home.

Do we fully appreciate the “rancor in our hearts” that was expressed at the ceremonies held in the days following the actual surrender document signed by General Robert E. Lee some 150 years ago Thursday?

It comes across from political operatives in an almost joking sense every time we see the maps that show blue and red states, with the “red” that signifies Republican victories seeming to be based heavily amongst those states that actually talked secession and tried to break away from the United States.

I remember one political operative literally saying that the opposition to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory was evidence that “they’re still fighting the Civil War” in the south.

I ALWAYS FIND it a little absurd to use Civil War analogies in such cases because one has to admit the significance of that military conflict from 1861-65 was that the split was so severe that people felt compelled to take up arms.

Heck, the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president was the act considered to be the final straw to the “state’s rights” camp that caused them to try to break away and form their own country. The political observer in me never fails to be amazed that Lincoln could win that election even though he wasn’t even on the ballot in most of the southern states – opposition to his alleged abolitionist ways was so strong!

We may have some serious splits in our national psyche, but I don’t see anyone outside of those militia types seriously talking about taking up arms. And the bulk of us realize those people are nuts.

We’re not taking such talk seriously. Perhaps that is the lesson we learned from the Civil War – that of the need to compromise.

PART OF WHAT motivates me to write this commentary is that I recently stumbled onto a re-run of the Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” documentary on the local PBS affiliate.

The Wise quote (if he really said it) caught my ear, as did the belief of historian Shelby Foote that the Civil War was caused by the ultimate failure of the two sides to reach a compromise – something he believes is the very premise of our society’s successes.

Does that make the Civil War merely an aberration? Something that we learned our lesson from and don’t need to focus so much attention on any longer?

I’d hate to think that, because then the quote from Winston Churchill about “fail(ing) to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” comes up. As in could our social split on so many issues someday become so extreme that somebody feels compelled to dig out their firearm and start shooting at those people who disagree?

TRYING TO MAKE sure that doesn’t happen could be the real significance of the talk that will occur Thursday from all the repeat references to people that the Civil War ended (for all practical purposes, if not literally) on this date in 1865.

That I’m sure many of you will dismiss with little thought – before moving on to the latest White Sox or Cubs score. Or perhaps you’re more intrigued by the sex-change conversion of one-time Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner?

Which is why a poem such as “Unreconstructed Rebel” (performed as a song by Hoyt Axton, although some say it was written as a parody) continues to have some relevance, rather than withering away into a relic of the past.

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