3 ms·

I agree with you - what is politically correct has changed. I think it often changes to be what is most convenient to those in power. There's a huluva lot more

I agree with you - what is politically correct has changed. I think it often changes to be what is most convenient to those in power. There's a huluva lot more to American history than the bad things, but recent trends I see make me fear that even the bad things will be swept under the rug. You see stories pop up all the time of colleges restricting speech because it hurts somebody's feelings. This is slowly starting to happen to public speech as well. As the article says, history is painful to face, and students today are more unwilling to put up with pain and more likely to demand that they not be subjected to any pain. Perhaps that just reflects what has been true of history, that it is often rewritten to convenience the ruling class and pacify the peasants.

WalterBright 11y ago
One thing about myths - Stephen Ambrose wrote a book "Nothing Like It In The World" about the building of the first transcontinental world. He wrote in the Acknowledgements that: "I had been taught to regard the railroad builders as the models for Daddy Warbucks. The investors and builders had made obscene profits which they used to dominate state and national politics to a degree unprecedented before or since. John Robinson's book The Octopus: A History of Construction, Conspiracies, Extortion, about the way the Big Four ruined California, expressed what I thought and felt. What made the record of the big shots so much worse was that it was the people's money they stole, in the form of government bonds and land. In my view, opposition to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific) had led to the Populist Party and then the Progressive Party, political organizations that I regarded as the saviors of America. I wanted nothing to do with those railroad thieves." However, once he got into it, he realized that about everything he knew about the project was a myth, and finished it with a transformed belief that it was the greatest American achievement of the 19th century. (It really is a marvelous book, too.)

WalterBright 11y ago

One thing about myths - Stephen Ambrose wrote a book "Nothing Like It In The World" about the building of the first transcontinental world. He wrote in the Acknowledgements that: "I had been taught to regard the railroad builders as the models for Daddy Warbucks. The investors and builders had made obscene profits which they used to dominate state and national politics to a degree unprecedented before or since. John Robinson's book The Octopus: A History of Construction, Conspiracies, Extortion, about the way the Big Four ruined California, expressed what I thought and felt. What made the record of the big shots so much worse was that it was the people's money they stole, in the form of government bonds and land. In my view, opposition to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific) had led to the Populist Party and then the Progressive Party, political organizations that I regarded as the saviors of America. I wanted nothing to do with those railroad thieves." However, once he got into it, he realized that about everything he knew about the project was a myth, and finished it with a transformed belief that it was the greatest American achievement of the 19th century. (It really is a marvelous book, too.)