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gently caress man go for it. It wouldn’t be the worst detail in here and it’s at least military adjacent due to the role the VA loans played.
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Jun 12, 2020 17:06
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From a purely financial history perspective, a 30 year, fixed rate, fully amortizing loan available to regular people is really something of a historical anomaly, so much of the rest of the world does a 30 or 40-year amortization on a 5 year loan that has a balloon at the end and is refinanced.
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Jun 12, 2020 17:12
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You can get a hell of a lot of socialism done in America if you just shove it through the prism of the military-industrial complex.
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Jun 12, 2020 17:54
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Nessus posted:Families also couldn't be separated on Master's say-so any more, and there was a substantial increase in personal and economic freedom, even with full acknowledgement of the manifold abuses of convict labor and the sharecropping system. I feel like not recognizing this more or less concedes the argument to the firebreathers of 1858: You're saying "they were right; it was just a bad thing that they were right." I don't think they were right. Not so long ago I came across this article: The Myth of the Kindly General Lee. It mentions that Lee nearly caused a slave revolt on his own plantation when he began breaking slave families up to sell them.
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Jun 12, 2020 18:22
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Safety Biscuits posted:Assume this is for an alternate history novel. Is there any simple way for the Union to win the ACW in 1862-4, or would it require the whole war to go differently? Even the peninsula campaign probably has the seeds of a Union victory. If you are willing to assume a Tall Confident McClellan who is not convinced he's outnumbered 3-1, Richmond falling in the summer of 1862 is not unlikely. Related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nANois3n-Cs PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Jun 12, 2020 18:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Even the peninsula campaign probably has the seeds of a Union victory. If you are willing to assume a Tall Confident McClellan who is not convinced he's outnumbered 3-1, Richmond falling in the summer of 1862 is not unlikely. Almost any battle in the East becomes a strategic victory for the Union if you put Grant or someone like Grant in charge. There was never a need to fight a pitched battle or charge the confederate lines head on, just a series of slow, cautious outflanking marches to get yourself to the gates of Petersburg or wherever and fix the Confederate army there. e: this does require a bit of hindsight. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Jun 12, 2020 19:03
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Everything about the Union’s military actions in the Eastern theater pre Grant just pisses me off to no end. It’s nearly 4 straight years of missed opportunities and bone headed mistakes that not only meant prolonging the war but by giving Lee so many high profile tactical victories to hang his hat on in the meantime it laid the groundwork for the Lost Cause which probably couldn’t have ever been a thing if the Confederacy was simply smashed in 62-63 at the latest.
Shimrra Jamaane fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Jun 12, 2020 19:18
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Even Grant's overland campaign isn't the best-fought campaign. Grant didn't let up, but if he just wanted to get to petersburg he didn't have to expend so much of his army to force Lee into a siege line there. Even if he doesn't attrit Lee that much it hardly matters at that point. He could've just sailed his army there, though I suppose Grant was a bit reluctant to test the bounds of his authority leaving Washington open, though leaving Burnside's detached force to demonstrate and follow Lee back to Petersburg would've done the trick.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:37
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This is horrifying. Thank you.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:38
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I'm gonna get angry at the internet for a second. This sort of thing really irritates me. The south seceded in order to protect the institution of chattel slavery. They lost the war, and in doing so decisively turned the country against chattel slavery, while at the same time were dragged kicking and screaming back into the union. The south was tremendously wealthy and powerful before the war -- so much so that a very small number of planter-class politicians were able to hold the country hostage for virtually the entire antebellum era. After the war, the south was physically wrecked, huge chunks of wealth gone along with the backbone of their economy (read: black people) along with large portions of the society that they'd seceded and fought to keep in place. The various iterations of institutional racism that occurred after the war were awful, but were in absolutely no way comparable to chattel slavery. Any sincere attempt at a comparison is completely off-base. The other factor here is the role of national politics and policy in America's failure to support her former slaves after the war. In fact, I personally lay the blame for a lot of the systemic failures after the war on the Radical Republicans and NIMBY northerners...the Republicans because their corruption and incompetency led to a lot of the poor policy and eventual end of Reconstruction, and the NIMBYs because they violently resisted black migration out of the deep south for a century+. If you have some Confederate former plantation owner you probably know his stance on race relations, but the people voting for/supporting Republican policies were extremely two-faced when it came to the issues facing freed slaves. Anyway this kind of thing is irritating because 1) it minimizes the work done by the actual dudes who won the actual war and accomplished real actual good things, and 2) glosses over a lot of the really ugly issues endemic to the US that linger...pretty much to the modern day that have little or nothing to do with the war. Alchenar posted:Almost any battle in the East becomes a strategic victory for the Union if you put Grant or someone like Grant in charge. There was never a need to fight a pitched battle or charge the confederate lines head on, just a series of slow, cautious outflanking marches to get yourself to the gates of Petersburg or wherever and fix the Confederate army there. This is certainly true at Antietam, but Grant certainly didn't display the tactical acumen to prevent disasters like Fredricksburg (assaulting a strong position with frontal assaults; pretty much the entirety of the Overland Campaign but especially Cold Harbor) or Chancellorsville (being ill-prepared for an aggressive enemy; Shiloh). Grant was certainly the right guy at the right time but he would've had a tough time against the ANV in its prime just like pretty much everyone else. bewbies fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 12, 2020 |
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Jun 12, 2020 19:52
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Everything about the Union’s military actions in the Eastern theater pre Grant just pisses me off to no end. It’s nearly 4 straight years of missed opportunities and bone headed mistakes that not only meant prolonging the war but by giving Lee so many high profile tactical victories to hang his hat on in the meantime it laid the groundwork for the Lost Cause which probably couldn’t have ever been a thing if the Confederacy was simply smashed in 62-63 at the latest. On the other hand, if the war had ended in 1862, it's kind of likely that slavery wouldn't have been abolished....or at least, it would have been a lot more difficult to have done so.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:55
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Epicurius posted:On the other hand, if the war had ended in 1862, it's kind of likely that slavery wouldn't have been abolished....or at least, it would have been a lot more difficult to have done so. I’ve actually thought of that. Hmm, what would be the sweet spot where the war ends earlier but slavery is still abolished? How much did the Confederacy need to succeed for the Union to take the plunge and make abolishing slavery a fundamental goal?
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Jun 12, 2020 20:02
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Everything about the Union’s military actions in the Eastern theater pre Grant just pisses me off to no end. It’s nearly 4 straight years of missed opportunities and bone headed mistakes that not only meant prolonging the war but by giving Lee so many high profile tactical victories to hang his hat on in the meantime it laid the groundwork for the Lost Cause which probably couldn’t have ever been a thing if the Confederacy was simply smashed in 62-63 at the latest. Shimrra Jamaane posted:I’ve actually thought of that. Hmm, what would be the sweet spot where the war ends earlier but slavery is still abolished? How much did the Confederacy need to succeed for the Union to take the plunge and make abolishing slavery a fundamental goal? I think once that bolt gets fired slavery is going out, although the route would have gone differently and if the Confederacy had rolled over they might have gotten partial compensation out of it. This would change the social dynamic of the situation and the future trajectory of American history... as a herbivore I cannot comment. However we do know what people actually did, and there was a popular idea at the time that the freed slaves would be dusted off, given a hot dinner, and immediately packed into a ship to go to Liberia or some other off-shore colony where they would not be in US territory any more. This did not happen, of course.
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Jun 12, 2020 20:31
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bewbies posted:This is certainly true at Antietam, but Grant certainly didn't display the tactical acumen to prevent disasters like Fredricksburg (assaulting a strong position with frontal assaults; pretty much the entirety of the Overland Campaign but especially Cold Harbor) or Chancellorsville (being ill-prepared for an aggressive enemy; Shiloh). Grant was absolutely no tactical savant (though he doesn't deserve some of the stick he gets imo) but the big deal about him is that he was willing to grip the ANV by the throat and not let go. In almost every battle in the Eastern theatre, even the AotP's worst defeats, the ratio of casualties says that if the Northern army had just gripped a bit harder and stayed on the field it would have won (setting aside for the moment the likelihood that the casualties would have been worse because of cascading disintegration).
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Jun 12, 2020 21:07
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Who was the general who said bluntly something along the lines of “sometimes men must die?”
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Jun 12, 2020 21:21
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Alchenar posted:Grant was absolutely no tactical savant (though he doesn't deserve some of the stick he gets imo) but the big deal about him is that he was willing to grip the ANV by the throat and not let go. In almost every battle in the Eastern theatre, even the AotP's worst defeats, the ratio of casualties says that if the Northern army had just gripped a bit harder and stayed on the field it would have won (setting aside for the moment the likelihood that the casualties would have been worse because of cascading disintegration).
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Jun 12, 2020 22:07
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Nessus posted:Wasn't his river campaign pretty god drat good? And without the benefit of being against McClellan? Oh yeah Grant is objectively a good general. And while he makes errors in the East, none of those errors result in the catastrophic flight of his army back over the Potomac, which distinguishes him from all of his predecessors except Meade. e: I think there's a loose analogy to be drawn with Haig. He's not one of the top ten generals in history, but he knows what he has to do to win the war and he does it.
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Jun 12, 2020 22:20
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bewbies posted:The various iterations of institutional racism that occurred after the war were awful, but were in absolutely no way comparable to chattel slavery. Any sincere attempt at a comparison is completely off-base. I know that there are reasons why people usually go out of their way to clarify that slavery in the americas was usually more barbaric than the cutesy slavery in Europe or Africa, and I know that many more modern comparisons of slavery tend to segue into weird stretches to criticize the wage system, but it isn't much of a jump to compare convict leasing around the turn of the century to slavery, where you still had forced laborers being whipped to death right up through 1922. It would've lasted longer, but that's when a man from North Dakota was whipped to death in Florida (while being rented out to a Wisconsin-owned company) and his family caused a stir when demanding that the North Dakota government investigate and exposed the system on the national stage. It's a step up, since the system didn't have as much legal protections and it wasn't done from birth like slavery, but it's not hard to see the one system being born from the death of the other as a way of rebuilding the labor market that the South had been built up around. It's one of those horrors that people don't learn much about but needs to be taught so that people know why we are where we are today.
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Jun 12, 2020 22:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:I know that there are reasons why people usually go out of their way to clarify that slavery in the americas was usually more barbaric than the cutesy slavery in Europe or Africa, and I know that many more modern comparisons of slavery tend to segue into weird stretches to criticize the wage system, but it isn't much of a jump to compare convict leasing around the turn of the century to slavery, where you still had forced laborers being whipped to death right up through 1922. It would've lasted longer, but that's when a man from North Dakota was whipped to death in Florida (while being rented out to a Wisconsin-owned company) and his family caused a stir when demanding that the North Dakota government investigate and exposed the system on the national stage. You’re right that the prison labor system was hosed and awful but it’s still a hell of a stretch to say “actually the confederates won in the end.”
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Jun 12, 2020 23:01
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Safety Biscuits posted:Assume this is for an alternate history novel. Is there any simple way for the Union to win the ACW in 1862-4, or would it require the whole war to go differently? I am far, far from a knowledgeable source on the ACW, but I have to think that if Lee had stayed loyal to the Union, the Confederacy would have been defeated significantly sooner and the war would have cost a lot fewer lives overall (presuming that he had an impact for the Union similar to his impact for the Confederacy, and didn't break his neck getting thrown from his horse in the first battle or something).
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Jun 12, 2020 23:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:You’re right that the prison labor system was hosed and awful but it’s still a hell of a stretch to say “actually the confederates won in the end.” A better way to look at this would seem to be "the planter class retrenched and defended a significant part of their influence and economic power." It took til Reagan for the South to start running the country again. 
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Jun 12, 2020 23:10
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Please do not overlook Woodrow Wilson.
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Jun 13, 2020 00:28
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Please do not overlook Woodrow Wilson. The only president with a PhD in history!
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Jun 13, 2020 00:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:The only president with a PhD in history! Not a great look for the field!
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Jun 13, 2020 00:36
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Please do not overlook Woodrow Wilson.
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Jun 13, 2020 00:43
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Nessus posted:Yeah? What'd he get up to? I mean I know he was racist but that wasn't that remarkable. I mean, he pretty singlehandedly resegregated the federal government and talked up the Klan. Race relations in the Wilson administration...weren't great.
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Jun 13, 2020 00:48
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Epicurius posted:I mean, he pretty singlehandedly resegregated the federal government and talked up the Klan. Race relations in the Wilson administration...weren't great.
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Jun 13, 2020 00:51
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Nessus posted:Yeah? What'd he get up to? I mean I know he was racist but that wasn't that remarkable. notably screened birth of a nation on the white house lawn, espionage and sedition acts, palmer raids, wildly interventionist foreign policy, etc
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Jun 13, 2020 01:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:You’re right that the prison labor system was hosed and awful but it’s still a hell of a stretch to say “actually the confederates won in the end.” Some of the issue with the hyperbole is that it's coming from a place where the popular perception of post war history is that slavery was done, blacks were freed and the end. Which feeds into the sentiment of, "It's been 155 years, why the hell haven't Blacks gotten over slavery?" that is so often said with a bit of a sneer. Yes, it's lacking in nuance but the popular perception is so loving wrong that that it's not even in the ballpark. The system that replaced it was a small improvement but it's still a pretty small improvement. But it also sets up a lot of other things that tie in to very modern race issues. Moving the power plantation owners had over slaves to the state having power over the Black population creates all kinds of lovely issues that linger. So using the hyperbole as a club to get people's attention for this isn't a bad thing. And it's only kinda wrong. In the end the plantation classes kept their power and ended up building a system that isn't exactly what they had before but one that solves some of the economic issues their old system was running them towards. Yeah, that's not really a win but it's not really a loss either.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:27
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Nessus posted:Fourteen points? More like the fourteen words! To be fair to Wilson, while he was pretty much as racist as you'd expect somebody who was born in Virginia in 1856, and was the son of one of the Presbyterian ministers who founded the Presbyterian Church in the United States (which was a bunch of Southern Presbytarians who split off from the main Presbyterian church when it condemned secession and slavery), and who's earliest memory was somebody cursing about the election of Abraham Lincoln, he never would have become a Nazi.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:46
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Thanks for the answers on the ACW guys.
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Jun 13, 2020 02:32
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Epicurius posted:To be fair to Wilson, while he was pretty much as racist as you'd expect somebody who was born in Virginia in 1856, and was the son of one of the Presbyterian ministers who founded the Presbyterian Church in the United States (which was a bunch of Southern Presbytarians who split off from the main Presbyterian church when it condemned secession and slavery), and who's earliest memory was somebody cursing about the election of Abraham Lincoln, he never would have become a Nazi.
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Jun 13, 2020 03:30
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Nessus posted:Why, because he died before they were invented? I mean, that's a pretty air-tight reason.
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Jun 13, 2020 04:22
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Nessus posted:Why, because he died before they were invented? Well, yes, but he was also, by all accounts, a fan of democracy (albeit a racist democracy), and while he expanded the reach of the federal government, he wasn't a totalitarian or believer in dictatorship.
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Jun 13, 2020 04:32
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Epicurius posted:Well, yes, but he was also, by all accounts, a fan of democracy (albeit a racist democracy), and while he expanded the reach of the federal government, he wasn't a totalitarian or believer in dictatorship.
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Jun 13, 2020 04:46
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Alchenar posted:Grant was absolutely no tactical savant (though he doesn't deserve some of the stick he gets imo) but the big deal about him is that he was willing to grip the ANV by the throat and not let go. In almost every battle in the Eastern theatre, even the AotP's worst defeats, the ratio of casualties says that if the Northern army had just gripped a bit harder and stayed on the field it would have won (setting aside for the moment the likelihood that the casualties would have been worse because of cascading disintegration). bewbies posted:This is certainly true at Antietam, but Grant certainly didn't display the tactical acumen to prevent disasters like Fredricksburg (assaulting a strong position with frontal assaults; pretty much the entirety of the Overland Campaign but especially Cold Harbor) or Chancellorsville (being ill-prepared for an aggressive enemy; Shiloh). Grant would not have taken a fight at Fredericksburg because keeping a supply train over pontoon bridge is a silly idea. His general gameplan was to assault, then evaluate and try to outflank the enemy position if another looked pointless. Cold Harbour was different because it was right outside Richmond, there's no reason for him to go all out to try and take the heights outside Fredericksburg. Chancellorsville was a Union victory that the AotP just retreated from for no good reason. Grant learned his lesson at Shiloh, which was so early in the war that Lee was also bungling attacks at Malvern Hill. Grant would have been fine. Even, Hooker might made it through Chancellorsville, if he didn't get a concussion and then lie around all day.
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Jun 13, 2020 05:07
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Nebakenezzer posted:Not so long ago I came across this article: The Myth of the Kindly General Lee. It mentions that Lee nearly caused a slave revolt on his own plantation when he began breaking slave families up to sell them. Also the slaves had been freed by Lee's father-in-law's will, but he refused to actually let them go.
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Jun 13, 2020 06:47
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As a Brit we have a lot of Roman roads and stuff left over when they decided our rotten isle wasn't worth it any more. Road chat is interesting as a lot of national infrastructure here like natural gas, telecoms etc... were put in under the guise of national defence. I'm also sure the railway network here was also approved because of a). Rampant money making leading to the underground bubble b). We can move armies around.
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Jun 13, 2020 09:47
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Epicurius posted:To be fair to Wilson, while he was pretty much as racist as you'd expect somebody who was born in Virginia in 1856, and was the son of one of the Presbyterian ministers who founded the Presbyterian Church in the United States (which was a bunch of Southern Presbytarians who split off from the main Presbyterian church when it condemned secession and slavery), and who's earliest memory was somebody cursing about the election of Abraham Lincoln, he never would have become a Nazi. A democratically elected racist is still a racist.
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Jun 13, 2020 11:24
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sullat posted:Also the slaves had been freed by Lee's father-in-law's will, but he refused to actually let them go. Not quite. The will specified "by this date, or as soon as Arlington is financially able to do without them, whichever comes sooner". Lee freed all Arlington slaves on the exact specified date. His justification for doing so was that his father in law had left the plantation in such a poor state that he could not responsibly free the labor force sooner.
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Jun 13, 2020 11:33
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