Welcome to 2022!
Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were good. It’s getting cold out here in the Central Valley. This morning there was frost and as soon as it warmed up a bit an almost instantaneous fog developed.
I’ve been reading a fascinating book titled How the South Won the Civil War by historian Heather Cox Richardson (who has a fantastic substack newsletter). I’m about halfway through the book, which is dense, but easily read. Here are a few ideas I found particularly interesting.
Our American education system oversimplifies our own history. There are so many events described in just the first 100 pages of this book that I don’t feel like I had much exposure to in my 20 years of school. It’s sad, really, to think that we are only getting one perspective on our history and it is told through a rosy lens. Understanding our history will hopefully help us move past it. We can treasure the idea of America and still recognize our failures as a country and work to make it better. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
The South “won” the Civil War by ensuring that its oligarchic ideology lived on. Slavery was a way to ensure that a small group of wealthy individuals continued to amass wealth. This oligarchy persisted beyond the Civil War and moved West, transforming from slave-farmed cotton plantations to railroads, cattle, gold, and silver, mostly built or worked by immigrants and Natives in horrible conditions.
On a different note, Vox News’ podcast Today Explained put out an entertaining song about 2021. You can find it here. It’s worth a listen.
I hope you all have a better 2022 than 2021!
-Anthony