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Talk:History of the Southern United States/Archive 1

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Archive 1

I just removed two articles from "External links" that didn't seem relevant:

The first appears to be about... magazines? It seems interesting from the abstract, but why does it belong here, in the external links of an article on the history of the South? If the material in it is relevant, it ought to be written into the article and cited, not tacked here at the end.

The second appears to be a random collection of popular myths in a literary journal. Not particularly historical. Why was this linked here? Again, if there's anything here that needs to be in the article, it ought to be in the article — though I don't feel this would be the best source to cite for any of this.

In any case, I don't think they belong as external links, which are meant to provide further reading for subjects that are in the article, or subjects that are relevant, but too big to discuss.

These seem to have been added to History of the U.S. Southern states back before the merge, by Poroubalous. Why? If there's a good reason for keeping them, add them back, but please explain why, and give a proper citation (as above) rather than just slapping the link on there. —LonelyPilgrim 13:16, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I see. The first one, on magazines, was cited in the article. In that case, it was mislabeled as an external link; it ought to have been listed as a reference. I shall add it back. The second one I still don't see. —LonelyPilgrim 13:24, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Neglected areas

This article is a fine historical recapitulation of the Colonial era, slavery, the Civil War and reconstruction, but weak elsewhere. I don't seem much on the antebellum settlement and development of the South-Central area and Texas, post-reconstruction history, or the rise of southern cities and industries. Many topics are neglected. --Zeamays (talk) 02:22, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Mode of production question regarding the antebellum South

It would be a good idea to flesh this entry out with some detailed examination of what distinguished slave society, or societies, of the antebellum Southern United States from capitalism on the one hand, and from feudal societies of Medieval Europe on the other.

An interesting, now out of print work, titled "The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South," by Raimondo Luraghi, makes a powerful and persuasive argument that the Southern United States and the Northern United States were esentially two different civilizations; Luraghi (I hope I'm spelling his name right) saw the south as being an outpost of plantation society like those that emerged in the Carribean and Brazil, and having little in common with the North.

Put simply, tn this schema the north was a capitalist society, with a mode of production based mostly and increasingly on wage labor; a progressive, rapidly industrializing, increasingly urban society, and the south was a distinct type of society that was not capitalist or feudal, a rural and largely stagnant unchanging social order, based on chattel slavery and land tenure.

Luraghi makes the point that you can't have a capitalist society that isn't predominantly based on wage labor. An entire world of social relations arises from the way that labor power is exploited, and a slave society is a very different type of animal from a market society based on wage labor.

A suplemental interesting take on this can be found in Faulkner's novel "Sartoris." The fast-fading world of the plantation south aristocrats is clearly not consistent with what's found in societies where market relations have overrun all earlier forms of social organization.

Miasnikov —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.102.65.146 (talk) 18:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

"The South was rural in 1890"

I removed this table and text because it did not seem to fit in the Reconstruction, 1865-1877 section it was in.

Any suggestions as to where it should go?

Start—

The South was rural in 1890

Agriculture's Share of the Labor Force by Region, 1890

Northeast 15%
Middle Atlantic 17%
Midwest 43%
South Atlantic 63%
South Central 67%
West 29%

—End

CraXyXarC (talk) 01:25, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

History of integration

An editor deleted the unsourced remark that "Formerly segregated black primary and secondary schools mostly closed, rather proving the point that they had been in mostly inferior infrastructure compared to those schooling white students." This is, nonetheless, true. No black parent would have sent their kid to a formerly segragated school while they had the means and publicity to send them to an integrated school. And no white parent would allow his child to be sent to a known black school, even if they were not predujiced - they would have assumed inferior teachers and infrastructure.

Most of the segragated schools were torn down or reconstructed and renamed and reused for a different purpose. For examples, a former black high school might have undergone upgrading, been renamed, as then used as an middle school.

This whole process infrequently happened up north for a number of various reasons, not the least of which was that the schools often did have equal facilties. I don't have a reference for this but it was pretty obvious throughout the south and there has to be a number of references somewhere. Student7 (talk) 13:46, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

since these developments happened 50+ years ago memory may well be fallible. they need a RS. Rjensen (talk) 20:35, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree that it needs a source. The point is, though, these refer to recent articles about the closed black schools in the media. Schools which non-blacks who weren't in the area at the time, weren't even aware of. I am not aware of any "summary" that relates all these facts. There is undoubtedly one or more out there. Student7 (talk) 16:14, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Anchors

Place them above the section heading, not in the middle of them. If there's a policy anywhere to the contrary, we need to remove it, since adding new anchors directly to the section heading breaks every correctly labelled section link on the site. — LlywelynII 00:03, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

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Neutrality

I think large portions of this article suffer from a White Southern POV, not giving due coverage to Black experience. In some cases the article is even propagating the Lost Cause mythology. Some random examples:

  • Pictures: Apart from the maps, only two pictures of the Revolutionary War and one showing the destruction of the Civil War. None showing slavery, lynching, segregation or Civil Rights movement.
  • The severe dislocations of war and Reconstruction affected the black population, with a large amount of sickness and death. @Rjensen: The source is fine, but the context is problematic. This is the only consequence of abolition mentioned in the section on Abolition, well in line with John C. Calhoun's "positive good" or Davis's vindication of slavery after the war, who claimed that Blacks were better off in slavery.
  • Reconstruction: Second came rule by the U.S. Army, which held elections that included all freedmen but excluded over 10,000 Confederate leaders. The reader gets the impression that that exclusion was unfair, and the elections were rigged by the army, so that the violent resistance (neutral historians call it "terror") seems justified. The reader will assume that the immediate collapse of the last Republican state governments came about because the army had defended those governments against the will of the people.
  • The economic calamity suffered by the South during the war affected every family. Every family ? Were there no families rejoicing in freedom ? Southern law didn't recognize slave families before 1865, some states had race-based legal restrictions on marriage until 1967, and this article denies the existence of Black families even in 2021.
  • The paragraph Sociologists report that Southern collective identity stems ... seems to identify "Southern collective identity" with White Southern identity.
  • The use of "classic" instead of "outdated", of "conservative" instead of "white supremacist". --Rsk6400 (talk) 19:33, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
I do object to condensing the section--please uncondense. You have two opponents on the tag and zero supporters. Rjensen (talk) 12:56, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
the critic seems to favor his own POV and wants to remove material that might suggest to readers a different opinion than his own. The job of editors is to report what the reliable published secondary sources say, regardless of the editor's own POV. The guidelines are explicit that NPOV applies to wiki editors not to the reliable sources: Wikipedia articles are required to present a neutral point of view. However, reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. says WP:BIASED. Rjensen (talk) 07:48, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
@Rjensen: I think you misunderstood me. My problem is that the article doesn't provide a balanced reflection of current historical scholarship. My point about reporting the sickness and death of many freedpeople was not the reliability or neutrality of Downs, but the context it is given by its placement in the article. I think you added Litwack in order to show that my protest against the use of the expression "every family" was pointless. My point was that the most important memory of the formerly enslaved was - in most cases - freedom, not calamities.
Could you please be more explicit as to where I was showing a POV differing from modern historical scholarship ? --Rsk6400 (talk) 07:12, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
Yes you erased the text and cite from the Down book--it reflects the best of modern scholarship on the hard life of the African Americans. Another book comes to the same conclusions: Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation by Gretchen Long. A leading scholarly journal stated: Taken together, "Sick from Freedom" and "Doctoring Freedom" offer different layers of the same tragic story, expand the long-neglected historiography on emancipated slaves and medical care, and provide new ways to understand emancipation. [Civil War History (June 2014) p. 195.] Rjensen (talk) 12:11, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
That leaves me confused. You did notice that I never criticized Down, did you? --Rsk6400 (talk) 14:25, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
You erased my text based on Down's book with this edit summary: 23:51, 12 February 2021‎ Rsk6400 talk contribs‎ 98,420 bytes −277‎ →‎Abolition of slavery: Removed sentence based on biased interpretation of book by Jim Downs Rjensen (talk) 15:14, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
I wrote "book by Jim Downs", not "interpretation by Jim Downs". The interpretation is the problem, not the book. I said so in my edit summary and explained my reasons on this talk page twice. --Rsk6400 (talk) 15:49, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

You seem to be talking past each other. Rjensen is focused on the hardships suffered by both whites and freedmen in the Civil War's wake, as explicated by historians such as Litwack and Downs. Rsk6400, on the other hand, is focused on the happiness many former slaves must surely have felt in being emancipated. Rsk6400's task, then, is to find reliable sources which confirm this and incorporate the material into the article. Tbobbed (talk) 17:48, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

No, I think it's more simple than that: A misunderstanding caused by the shortness of my edit summary. On the other hand, it's also more complicated than that: Too many parts of the article violate NPOV, and repairing that will be no easy task. --Rsk6400 (talk) 18:46, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
Note that Tbobbed has been blocked indefinitely for sockpuppetry. --Rsk6400 (talk) 12:19, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

@Rjensen: Your only reply was based on a misunderstanding (at least you didn't protest when I collapsed that discussion). Please improve the article or leave the POV-tag where it belongs. Rsk6400 (talk) 08:04, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

I do object. your claims include zero reliable sources . Rjensen (talk) 12:56, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Bias and lack of citation in first paragraph of Civil War section

You know there's a bias issue when the writer is going out of their way to pretend an attack wasn't an attack. Cannon fire and taking of prisoners is an attack, even if nobody died and the side doing the attacking has what they believe to be justifications for it. I'm noting this because this content made me laugh and it's been sitting there for many years now, UNCITED. Stefen Towers among the rest! Talk • Work 23:03, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Which section, give more details? Sunriseshore (talk) 22:15, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
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