Dear Editor,
Well said, Dr. Swann! Please understand, I do not support slavery and would not have wanted to be a slave owner had I lived in the old Confederacy. Even so, I do think that, then, as now, some people twist things to their own ends, that is to say there is some ‘spin doctoring’, some historical revision to suit modern ends, like Swann suggested, and people need to look carefully at what actually happened in the past just as they need to carefully look at what is going on in the present.
That’s kind of the reason why students are in colleges and universities and what they are supposed to be learning to do! One thing that really troubles me about a lot of modern day colleges and universities is that students are getting ‘force-fed’ only one point of view, from one side or the other (nowadays, usually the liberal side) and not learning to think for themselves, to find the evidence and to examine it carefully.
It would probably flabbergast and amaze my old history professors at ETSU (Dr. Ronnie Day and Dr. Emmett ‘by God’ Essin would probably fall over in a dead faint), however, I have become somewhat of a ‘history buff’ and it often amazes me, when I carefully examine history nowadays, at how the popular current ideas of what happened don’t necessarily always go along with what actually happened in the past.
Not only history students but science students, medical students, criminal justice students, pre-law students and others need to learn to think a lot more carefully and to examine things a lot more carefully as they prepare for their careers. Anyway, again, my compliments to Dr. Swann, respectfully submitted!
E. Marshall Buckles