Historian Receives Death Threat + Decline of Civil War Reenactments

     . . . . Historian and journalist, Minisha Sineha (her specialty is African American abolitionists and their writing) wrote this piece pointing out what our current administration and POTUS share with Andrew Johnson and his disastrous period in the White House:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/25/opinions/what-happened-the-last-time-a-president-chose-americas-enemies-over-its-friends-sinha/index.html?

She then delineates what is different between then and now:

  Quote Congressional Republicans in the 1860s, tempered in the fire of the Civil War, put their country before a traitorous President. They first passed the Tenure of Office Act of 1867 to protect Republican Cabinet members and office holders from Johnson. When Johnson violated the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, congressional Republicans drew up articles of impeachment against him. 
Congressional Republicans today, in contrast, have not lifted a finger to protect Justice Department officials and special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation from the threat of interference by Trump. In fact, they have aided and abetted the Trump administration's undermining of both.

The consequence for writing this piece is that Sinha received a death threat from an individual who knew her home address and other personal information -- cops were able to track him down in about 24 hours. Guess where the guy threatening to kill her lives . . . . 

https://twitter.com/profmsinha?lang=en

Always knew being an honest historian was a dangerous thing. 

Alas, today there are no Grants and Shermans to keep the wrecked ship of state from going under prior to the next election when Johnson was thrown out. 

This is also went up yesterday - today:

"Civil War Reenactors in Decline" in the NY Times -- PAYWALL: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/style/civil-war-reenactments.html?

Focus of the story is the annual Battle of Gettysburg reenactment. Great photos! 

  Quote “Up until the last five or 10 years, the social causes of the war did not come into what we do,” he said. “We were paying tribute to the fighting man.” 

“It wasn’t ‘I’m racist and I want to glorify slavery,’” he said. “Nobody really thought a lot about the social reasons of why the South went to war. It was just these poor guys who were underfed, undermanned, underequipped, fighting valiantly to the last man, until they couldn’t stand anymore.” 

Brad Keefer, a 61-year-old corporal in the Union re-enactor ranks and a professor of history at Kent State University, said: “Re-enactors look at the war as a four-year period between 1861 and 1865 in which you can cut out all the stuff leading up to the war and very much ignore everything that happened afterward.” 
It’s a vision of history placed in narrow context. The military details are meticulously researched and recreated down to the stitching of a uniform, but the broader social and political realities of the Civil War — the profound struggle over slavery and emancipation, racism and equality, citizenship and disenfranchisement — are largely confined to the margins. 

Still, those issues can’t be ignored. After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where demonstrators wore swastikas and carried Confederate flags, and where an anti-racist protester named Heather Heyer was killed, at least two smaller Civil War re-enactments were canceled. That the battle flag Confederate re-enactors carry is still used as a means of intimidation makes it hard to defend as a purely historical object, independent of its racist implications. 
“You build a comfort zone for the hobby to function,” Mr. Keefer said. Pointing to the Confederate camp, he said: “And give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t at Charlottesville.” . . .

This is what happens when ignoring history and / or insisting on lies as history, and constantly pushing them out there as historical truth -- and there is a lot of that withing reenactment.

  Quote Some Confederate re-enactors, including Kenny Glass, 46, an emergency medical technician from Selma, Ala., said that slavery had little to do with Southern secession, an assertion that is at odds with historical scholarship. 

“I’ve been called a racist, a bigot, everything you could think of in the world when people find out I do this,” Mr. Glass said. “I tell them they need to learn their history. It wasn’t fought over slavery. It was fought over Southern rights, that’s just the way I see it.” 
Part of the problem is that the historical beliefs have modern day implications. Scrutiny of Civil War re-enacting from outside — as well as introspection and concern about its future on the inside — reached a fever pitch after the violence last year in Charlottesville, Va. But it built along with protests in many cities that demanded the removal of Confederate statues and monuments from state grounds, spurred by the murder of nine black worshipers in South Charleston, S.C., by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. 

 Last year a pipe bomb was found at a reenactment of the Battle of Cedar Creek (the culminating action in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign): 

  QuoteA month later, a threat was made against participants in a parade that commemorates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

So, along with aging out, video games etc., white supremacy terrorism is having an effect on suppressing our Civil War's reenactment participation. 

So one can see why these two pieces of journalism seem to go together, right?  The forces of white supremacy commit  and / or try to commit violence, down to murder, of those they hate and disagree with, even  where innocent children are found.

Yet -- the anti-white supremacy, anti-bigotry, anti-immigration ban, anti-corporate money in elections, anti-voter repression, pro environmental and consumer regulations, pro gun regulation people -- are called uncivil because their words hurt the feelings of white supremacists, etc.