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239 reviews for:
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
Ty Seidule
4.4 AVERAGE
239 reviews for:
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
Ty Seidule
4.4 AVERAGE
One of the most important books on Civil War Memory, the Lost Cause, and the religion of Robert Edward Lee ever written. I will be recommending this book to everyone.
10 battle flags out of 10
10 battle flags out of 10
Excellent balance of personal story and historical facts. Robert Lee was a much worse person than you thought. We should all stop saying Union soldiers and just say US soldiers. Lee attacked the US and killed American soldiers.
p47 Compromise of 1790, first of 3 compromises spaced 30 years apart, that kept the U.S. one nation.
p56 "When I [author] talk about the Civil War or Confederate monuments, I hear complaints that I'm trying to change history. Is the new memorial in Alexandria changing history or correcting history? Yes to both. It's recovering a story lost and creating a more accurate portrayal of the past. History is always changing. We link the past to our conception of the present and we always have."
p96-7 Truman asked about creation of Civil Rights Commission, said inspired by the lynching in Monroe, Georgia, and the beating & blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard in South Carolina; both horrified him.
p139 Author's thoughts years later of his acceptance that at his commissioning ceremony in Lee Chapel at Washington & Lee there were more Confederate flags than U.S. flags.
p150 "During WWII, the army supported fighting in Italy, France, and all over the Pacific simultaneously. African American truckers accounted for nearly 75 percent of the famed Red Ball Express supplying...Patton's Third Army...against the German Wehrmacht in 1944 and 1945."
Author describes the naming of bases for Confederate officers, Chapter 5.
p152 Outgoing (Buchanan's administration) secretary of war, John B. Floyd sided with Confederacy. Grant later wrote that Floyd "distributed the cannon and small arms from the Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them."
p159 references the successful coup d'etat and murder of African Americans in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, overturning the biracial 'Fusion' government. President McKinley did nothing.
p171fwd describes how Jubal Early was an early and prolific propagandist for the Lost Cause narrative.
p56 "When I [author] talk about the Civil War or Confederate monuments, I hear complaints that I'm trying to change history. Is the new memorial in Alexandria changing history or correcting history? Yes to both. It's recovering a story lost and creating a more accurate portrayal of the past. History is always changing. We link the past to our conception of the present and we always have."
p96-7 Truman asked about creation of Civil Rights Commission, said inspired by the lynching in Monroe, Georgia, and the beating & blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard in South Carolina; both horrified him.
p139 Author's thoughts years later of his acceptance that at his commissioning ceremony in Lee Chapel at Washington & Lee there were more Confederate flags than U.S. flags.
p150 "During WWII, the army supported fighting in Italy, France, and all over the Pacific simultaneously. African American truckers accounted for nearly 75 percent of the famed Red Ball Express supplying...Patton's Third Army...against the German Wehrmacht in 1944 and 1945."
Author describes the naming of bases for Confederate officers, Chapter 5.
p152 Outgoing (Buchanan's administration) secretary of war, John B. Floyd sided with Confederacy. Grant later wrote that Floyd "distributed the cannon and small arms from the Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them."
p159 references the successful coup d'etat and murder of African Americans in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, overturning the biracial 'Fusion' government. President McKinley did nothing.
p171fwd describes how Jubal Early was an early and prolific propagandist for the Lost Cause narrative.
informative
reflective
fast-paced
This book may have turned me into one of those civil war obsessed dads, but in a good way. The author does an excellent job contextualizing the war while debunking so many myths using primary sources including secessionists and Lee's own words.
An honest telling of going from a racist Robert E Lee supporter to having his eyes opened to the truth about the Confederate South.
Every white American should read this book and consider deeply the lessons they learned in school…perhaps, those lessons were more myth than fact.
This educational and factually supported story is a must read.
This is an amazing story of one white man's journey from promoting a white supremacist narrative of the Civil War and his childhood hero Robert E. Lee to an antiracist view of both. Granted, like most of us old white guys, the author should have known better much earlier in his life, especially as he was and is a historian, but this is a testament to the effectiveness and salience of the white supremacist idea in the United States; when one is raised believing the truth of the racial story promulgated by white people, an entire restructuring of one's thought process and belief systems is required in order to reconfigure that perception. We are privileged to see Ty Seidule's process as he goes through this transformation. There is inherently a degree of self-congratulations in such a memoir and he does not escape this trap. It is tempting to say, "welcome to the human race," to point out that he has only reached the bare minimum of antiracist understanding, as is true of most of us who are white and have been skating by on our privilege for the decades of our lives and the centuries of our predecessors. Still, we all must begin somewhere and I applaud his forthrightness and willingness to publicly engage in some deep and painful self-examination.
Unfortunately, this book falls into a category I have seen far too much of in the past ten years or so: it would have been a far better book with some judicious guidance by an editor. Seidule really has only one theme here: he grew up loving and respecting the legacy of Robert E. Lee, came to discover that Lee was a racist and traitor who should never have been revered, nonetheless honored with university names, street names, statues, and plaudits. He violated his oath as an officer of the U.S. Army, was responsible for the death of thousands of those he had sworn to protect, and engaged in this fight for the express purpose of supporting and expanding a nation based on the enslavement, rape, torture, and death of an entire group of people. There really is only so many ways one can restate, "mea culpa, I believed a lie and propped up a white supremacist traitor. Now I'm angry." Because he is a historian, one must believe that he could have expanded the story of Lee or his own, or perhaps fleshed it out with more of a narrative of the war. I understand the impulse to create something which is book-length, but to do so with repetition of the same points again and again is not a reasonable strategy (and makes for a rather unsatisfying read). I honestly don't hold the author much to account for this fundamental compositional error; that's what editors are for. I also note his rather frequent use of sentence fragments and attribute this to the same cause. This could have been solved by any competent copy editor; that's what semicolons were made for. One more specific complaint: once he has determined that the word "plantation" is a racist dodge and decides to call them slave labor camps, there is no need to repeat this renaming each time he uses the word. Eventually he stops with the parentheticals, but it takes far too long for this authorial choice to be made.
Still and all, this is an important addition to antiracist literature as written by white people who have finally come to their senses. It is no substitute for the harder-hitting indictments of white supremacy such as Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, How To Be an Antiracist from Ibram X. Kendi, or Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy, but as an adjunct to them is a valuable contribution.
Unfortunately, this book falls into a category I have seen far too much of in the past ten years or so: it would have been a far better book with some judicious guidance by an editor. Seidule really has only one theme here: he grew up loving and respecting the legacy of Robert E. Lee, came to discover that Lee was a racist and traitor who should never have been revered, nonetheless honored with university names, street names, statues, and plaudits. He violated his oath as an officer of the U.S. Army, was responsible for the death of thousands of those he had sworn to protect, and engaged in this fight for the express purpose of supporting and expanding a nation based on the enslavement, rape, torture, and death of an entire group of people. There really is only so many ways one can restate, "mea culpa, I believed a lie and propped up a white supremacist traitor. Now I'm angry." Because he is a historian, one must believe that he could have expanded the story of Lee or his own, or perhaps fleshed it out with more of a narrative of the war. I understand the impulse to create something which is book-length, but to do so with repetition of the same points again and again is not a reasonable strategy (and makes for a rather unsatisfying read). I honestly don't hold the author much to account for this fundamental compositional error; that's what editors are for. I also note his rather frequent use of sentence fragments and attribute this to the same cause. This could have been solved by any competent copy editor; that's what semicolons were made for. One more specific complaint: once he has determined that the word "plantation" is a racist dodge and decides to call them slave labor camps, there is no need to repeat this renaming each time he uses the word. Eventually he stops with the parentheticals, but it takes far too long for this authorial choice to be made.
Still and all, this is an important addition to antiracist literature as written by white people who have finally come to their senses. It is no substitute for the harder-hitting indictments of white supremacy such as Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, How To Be an Antiracist from Ibram X. Kendi, or Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy, but as an adjunct to them is a valuable contribution.
There were several good chapters in this book but a few seemed too long, repetitive and poorly edited. He admits to being righteous in what seems to be his recent awakening to his own racism. It may this righteousness that causes him to be repetitive. What I found very interesting is that his girlfriend, who later became his wife, told him of his racist views before they married yet it took him decades to realize it for himself. Didn't give her much credit at the time apparently. He does a great job of taking Robert E Lee down however and I appreciated his writing about the military and federal governments role in casting Lee as some sort of hero.