Vulture posted:

geegee posted:

Do you mean the most recent which reduced the former Yugoslavia to its component parts?

ThePutty posted:

Is there any good books on modern Arab history in the Middle East? Things like the Arab Revolt, Israel and Palestine, the rise of dictatorships and everything in between and outside of that.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

This quote gets brought up alot about Shelby Foote and I think it gets misconstrued. The 'today if the circumstances were similar' bit in that quote is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, but it's always been my reading that he's saying 'if I'd been born in Mississippi in 1840 and lived there in 1863, I would absolutely be fighting for the confederacy because that's what basically every white male of military age did because they believed XYZ and were raised in ZYX culture' and not saying 'I, as a person in 1997, would fight for the confederacy tomorrow because I believe it had a just cause and slavery was good.' Maybe that's an overgenerous interpretation. Foote definitely didn't mature a ton intellectually and got more reactionary in his old age, which is also unfortunately when he got a ton of press and notoriety from the Ken Burns thing. I won't try to defend Foote as any less or more racist or Lost Cause-ist than any other southerner born in 1915, but I think his work is still very important, especially in the context of the influence it had on popular perceptions of the war.

Confederate soldiers fought for an awful lot of different and nuanced reasons (mostly to do with maintaining the institutions of slavery, for sure!) and for anyone interested in those reasons, I would highly recommend General Lee's Army by Joseph Glatthaar. It's got a ton of social history and research about the actual confederate soldiers in the Army of Northern VA and it was a really fascinating read for me.

quote:

INTERVIEWER
Bedford Forrest's picture hangs on your wall. He was an ex-slave trader, responsible for the Fort Pillow massacre of captured black soldiers, and after the war deeply involved in the Ku Klux Klan.

FOOTE
You could add that in hand-to-hand combat he killed thirty-one men, mostly in saber duels or pistol shootings, and he had thirty horses shot from under him. Forrest is one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history; he surmounted all kinds of things and you better read back again on the Fort Pillow massacre instead of some piece of propaganda about it. Fort Pillow was a beautiful operation, tactically speaking. Forrest did everything he could to stop the killing of those people who were in the act of surrendering and did stop it.

Forrest himself was never a bloodthirsty sort of man who enjoyed slaughter. He also took better care of his soldiers and his black teamsters than any other general I know of. He was a man who at the age of sixteen had to raise six younger brothers and sisters after the death of his blacksmith father. He became a slave trader because that was a way of making enough money to support all those people and to get wealthy. Forrest was worth about a million dollars when the war started, an alderman for the city of Memphis. He was by no means some cracker who came out of nowhere. All writers will have great sympathy with Forrest for something he said. He did not like to write and there are very few Forrest letters. He said, I never see a pen but I think of a snake.

He's an enormously attractive, outgoing man once you get to know him and once you get to know more facts. For instance, he was probably Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but he dissolved that Klan in 1869; said that it's getting ugly, it's getting rough, and he did away with it. The Klan you're talking about rose again in this century and was particularly powerful during the 1920s. Forrest would have had no sympathy with that later Klan. Last thing in the world was he anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic, which is what that Klan was mainly in the twenties. I have a hard time defending the Klan and I don't really intend to defend it; I would never have joined it myself, even back in its early days.