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I noticed that one of my older posts was linked to at another blog, U.S. History Ideas for Teachers. The author is Lauren Schreiber Brown and her piece was both detailed and thoughtful. The link in question is the second in this paragraph (from The 7 Things All Good Lessons Have in Common):

And realistically, that’s what a lot of us do. We know what we did last year, and yesterday, and so what comes next is comparing the North and South. But we should–every year–ask ourselves why do students need to know about the similarities and differences between the North and South? What is the point? How does this understanding help us better comprehend both the onset of the Civil War as well as its outcome? Do any of these differences still exist? In what way(s) does studying this topic improve the quality of our students’ lives?

I wanted to respond. But my response was too long for the character count at that blog. Plus, even the shorter comment I left there was never approved or else disappeared into the internet purgatory. So, I’ll make it a post, as I think it’s a worthy topic.

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I’m not a teacher, but I found this post interesting. I like how much thought you are putting into this. Education is important and teaching is a tough job. I’m glad to know teachers like you are out there are considering these kinds of issues and questions.

I noticed you linked to my blog, the post comparing the North and South. I spent my own grade school education initially in the Midwest and later in the Deep South. I never liked history, I must admit. I can’t say I had bad teachers, but they never quite found a way to make history seem to matter in my experience. In particular, I didn’t learn anything about the differences between the North and South.

I don’t even remember what I was taught in any history class. None of it ever stuck. I didn’t even know I enjoyed learning about history until I was well into adulthood. In recent years, I’ve taken history more seriously and have become fascinated about it, and not just about American history either.

I’m constantly coming across new data. It amazes me all the things I didn’t learn in school. History, if taught well, should be one of the most engaging topics for students. Yet so many people similar to me were bored silly by history classes. Why is that?

Early America was an interesting place. But before I started studying on my own, I didn’t realize that was the case. Most Americans, for example, are unaware that several colonies had non-British majorities. I was reminded again of this diversity recently:

“…from every part of Europe.”

At that post, I share a passage from The World in 1776 by Marshall B. Davidson. The part that most stood out to me is where he points out that, “One-third of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were of non-English stock, eight being first-generation immigrants.” I never knew that.

That multicultural reality was a central point that Thomas Paine made in arguing for independence. He wrote that, “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.”

I realize that is just info. But a good teacher should be able to make it relevant by connecting the diversity of the past to the diversity of the present. It’s not as if America only became an immigrant country in the 20th century. We are living in a continuity of what came before. An effective teacher would bring history alive and get students excited through the teacher’s own engagement with the subject matter.

I know one thing that helped for me was doing genealogical research. That made it personally real. But that goes off into a different kind of learning experience.

Contrast that to how I was taught history when I was younger. I remember in one class that I took 20 pages of notes for a single test. The teacher wasn’t horrible and he did try to get us to think about what we were learning, but I remember just feeling swamped by endless factoids. I wasn’t able to assimilate the info and no one taught me how to do so. That is the biggest failure of school in my experience, the lack of teaching students how to learn which goes hand in hand with teaching the love of learning.

I was a fairly smart kid. I had a learning disability and that made it difficult, but I was able to learn when I felt engaged enough. Still, the way I was so often taught made me hate school. It felt like a pointless struggle. In a sink or swim education system, I usually found myself sinking.

I had to learn how to learn mostly on my own and mostly as an adult. And I doubt I’m alone in that experience. That is a problem for the education system, and it isn’t a problem that can easily be dealt with by individual teachers. I imagine teachers are too busy just trying to teach to the test that anything more involved than the basics is asking for the near impossible.

It makes me sad that teachers get blamed. Teachers don’t have the time and resources to be effective. To focus on one thing means to sacrifice everything else. I couldn’t imagine the amount of planning it takes to try to make it all work.

Your emphasis on a conclusion probably is important. More than trying to shove info into students’ heads, a teacher should help them to understand the significance, ideally both in terms of personal relevance and real world application. A conclusion should drive home some central point or issue. What is learned needs to be connected and framed for otherwise it will quickly be forgotten.

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I should point out that some of my favorite classes were also my most demanding.

I had an awesome art teacher. He was a professional artist and taught me some serious skills. But his teaching went way beyond that. He is the only teacher I ever had who taught me how to think on my own.

Of course, art is far different from history. Maybe more similar to history is a topic like English, which was one of my other favorite classes. I had an English teacher who was English and he focused on the classics. He didn’t shy away from teaching difficult works. I suppose it was in 11th grade when I took his class and one book we read was Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, a daunting piece of writing even for an adult. He simply taught me the love of engagement with a text, as it was clear how much he enjoyed what he taught.

It’s hard to know what is the difference that makes a difference. I’m sure there were students who were bored and disengaged even in those classes that I loved so much. Not everything is going to work well for all students. That is the greatest challenge, especially the more students there are in a single class. It’s easy for students to get lost in a teacher’s focus on the entire class.

In the end, I think the most important thing a teacher does is to model a particular attitude and sets of behaviors. Students won’t likely care about what a teacher doesn’t care about. On the other hand, a love of learning can be contagious, even for a subject matter a student normally dislikes. I ultimately think there is no such thing as boring material, even if some subjects are harder to teach than others.

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By the way, I thought I’d share with you some cool facts. Combined, they are an example of how cool facts can help make larger points and show greater connections.

William Penn died in 1718. That was the year Benjamin Franklin was indentured as a printer’s apprentice. Some years later as an older teenager, Franklin made his way to Philadelphia where he began to do his own printing. Pennsylvania was one of those colonies that had a non-British majority, as Penn had traveled in Germany and intentionally invited Germans among others to settle in his colony (it’s interesting to note that more Americans today have German ancestry than any other, especially in the Northern states). Franklin complained about all the Germans for fear they wouldn’t assimilate (sounds familiar?). But as a businessman he was quick to take advantage by printing the first German language newspaper there.

When Franklin was in London, he met Thomas Paine, both having in common their being autodidacts. It was also in London where Paine first saw major political and labor union organizing, along with regular food riots. I might note that it was in London that the Palatine Germans (in the early 1700s) first immigrated before many headed to the American colonies, although these aren’t the same Germans that mostly populated Pennsylvania. This particular influx of Germans did happen in Franklin’s childhood and so it was a major social issue at the time. Anyway, by way of Franklin, Paine made his way to the American colonies and he ended up in Philadelphia, which is the location of Germantown where among the Germans the abolition movement began, and also where Paine helped found the first American abolition society. It was in Philadelphia that Paine first experienced the diversity of the American colonies and so was inspired to see them as something more than a mere extension of England.

It is interesting that the British used so many Hessian soldiers. This was related to Great Britain having alliances with German states. King George III being the Elector of Hanover (ethnically German and the first in his line to speak English as his first language). In the American Revolution, there were Germans fighting on both sides. Many of the descendants of those Germans would also fight each other in the world wars, although then with Americans and the Britains as allies.

Thomas Paine died in 1809. That was the year Abraham Lincolon was born. Lincoln, of course, was famous for ending slavery (after Lincoln’s winning the presidency with the support of German-Americans, the Civil War was partly won because of the mass immigrations to the North, including the often idealistic and socially liberal German Forty-Eighters, refugees of a failed revolution). Less well known is that Lincoln was influenced by Paine’s writings and, like Paine, wrote a deist tract (the only copy of which was burned up by a friend who thought it threatened LIncoln’s political career).

About a half century later, Theodore Roosevelt would call Paine “that dirty little atheist.” That is interesting when one considers that Roosevelt, like Lincoln before him, helped to promote Paine’s progressive vision of America. Teddy’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would push that progressivism to yet another level. Although in a different party from Lincoln, FDR also was heavily inspired by Paine. As a side note, the Roosevelt family’s ancestry goes back to the Dutch settlers of the Dutch colony that would become New York, yet another part of early American diversity, and also the place where young Franklin first ran away to and where Paine would spend his last years.

Let me shift back to Lincoln’s lifetime. Karl Marx, who was born in Germany and saw firsthand the social unrest that led to the revolutions of 1848, was forced to flee to England. From there, he later wrote a letter to Lincoln to show his support for the Union’s cause in fighting slave power. Marx probably felt an affinity because Lincoln, early on as president, openly argued that “Labor is the superior of capital.” Charles Dana was a socialist Republican who, before becoming Lincoln’s Undersecretary of War, was the managing editor of the New York Tribune where he published Marx’s writings. Lincoln regularly read that newspaper and Dana had introduced him Marx’s ideas on a labour theory of value.

Marx’s ideas would then be a major inspiration for the ideological conflict that erupted into the Cold War. There was always an ethnic element to this as well, whether the enemy was Germans or Russians, but Germans unlike Russians were always seen as a greater threat since that ancestry was so large in America. German-Americans were always mistrusted, from the colonial era to the world wars. Early twentieth century saw the cultural genocide and forced assimilation of German-Americans, which saw many being sent to internment camps. Until that time, German-Americans had continually maintained their own culture with newspapers written and even public schools taught in the German language. German-American culture was wiped from the collective memory and this heritage was lost for so many.

All of that then leads up to where we are now. The world wars sent even more Germans to the US. Waves of German immigrants have regularly occurred throughout American history. That is why there are today so many Americans of German ancestry, including many students who are not being taught this history about their own ancestors. Sadly, most Americans have forgotten or else never learned about both the early diversity of America and the early radicalism of the likes of Paine.

There ya go. From colonial era to revolution to civil war to the present. That is how one makes history interesting and it was accomplished in only about a page of text. But why this can never be taught is because it is neither politically correct nor ideologically neutral, even though it is all entirely true.

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I had some thoughts about the example of cool facts that I offered.

There are several reasons why it demonstrates effective communication of history. Besides offering cool facts, multiple connections are offered, a larger framing is made to give context, the development of issues and ideas is shown over time, and a conclusion is offered that explains the relevance. All of that is accomplished in a few paragraphs.

My brain works that way. I make connections and I look for the big picture. That is part of my “learning disability.” What doesn’t work for me is factoid rote learning. Then again, that is true for most people, even if more extremely true for my weirdly operating brain.

So, why don’t teachers teach this way? Because the education system isn’t set for it.

In those paragraphs, I covered material involving multiple countries, multiple centuries, multiple individuals, multiple conflicts, and multiple issues. That doesn’t conform to how students are tested and so the system disincentivizes teaching in a way that would be the most effective. No standardized test will ever have a question that covers such a large territory of knowledge, even though that is precisely what makes interesting history, how it all fits together.

Still, a great teacher would find a way to bring in that style of teaching, if only in those rare moments when time allows.

American Eyes On Cuba

Reading the below passage, I was reminded of the Cold War attitude and actions toward Cuba. This included the failed invasion and nuclear showdown during Kennedy’s administration.

There has been a longstanding antagonism between the US and Cuba. The US relationship to Cuba has involved paranoia, intrigue, and acquisitiveness. This has also involved conflict in both places, especially conflicts related to race and slavery, but also regional and partisan conflict in the US and class conflicts in Cuba.

The difference back then was that the feared superpower was the Spanish Empire, instead of the Soviet Union. Still, it was the same basic jostling for political power, imperial expansion, and military positioning.

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The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War
By Leonard L. Richards
Kindle Locations 2109-2145

Upon arriving in Madrid, Soulé immediately alienated the Spanish government. He denounced the monarchy and cavorted openly with revolutionaries. He got into a duel with the French ambassador after one of the ambassador’s guests made a disparaging remark about Mrs. Soulé’s plunging neckline. For this affront the ambassador suffered a debilitating leg wound. From the outset, Soulé also made it clear that his mission was to acquire Cuba by hook or by crook. By this time, moreover, the Spanish, as well as every other European power, had heard that Quitman was raising troops to invade Cuba.

In September 1853, the Spanish government responded. It appointed the Marqués de la Pezuela captain general of Cuba, a post that put him in command of both the military and the government, with orders to take steps to defend Cuba. In December he issued decrees that among other things cracked down on those illegally engaged in the slave trade and gave citizenship rights to blacks illegally imported before 1835. At the same time, he recruited free blacks into the militia. Coming from a government that had no interest in abolishing either slavery or the African slave trade, Pezuela’s policy of “Africanization” made it clear that he was willing, if necessary, to use black troops against Quitman’s invaders and against any Cuban planter who sympathized with them.

Pezuela’s policy was also risky. It sparked fears of slave rebellion throughout the white South and calls for reprisals. It also aroused militants in the Mississippi Delta. They wanted action quickly. In response, the Louisiana legislature demanded “decisive and energetic measures.” Quitman, however, was unwilling to move until he had three thousand men, one armed steamer, and $220,000 at his disposal.11

Meanwhile, the Pierce administration decided that it might be possible to purchase Cuba if firebrands like Quitman were temporarily restrained. On April 3, Secretary of State William L. Marcy sent new instructions to Soulé, authorizing him to purchase Cuba for up to $130 million. If Spain refused, Soulé was then to concern himself with the problem of how to “detach” Cuba from Spain.12 Eight weeks later, the administration announced that it would prosecute all men who violated U.S. neutrality laws. The New Orleans grand jury then required Quitman to post a $3,000 bond guaranteeing his adherence to the neutrality laws for the next nine months. In the interim, in Cuba, Pezuela arrested more than a hundred pro-American planters and put some to death. Later that same year, Pierce called Quitman to Washington and showed him evidence that Cuba was strongly defended.13

Meanwhile, in Madrid, Soulé had no luck trying to buy Cuba. So the Pierce administration decided to let him confer privately with the other ministers in Europe—James Buchanan at London and John Y. Mason at Paris—and decide if it was feasible to persuade Spain to sell Cuba to the United States. Meeting in Ostend in October 1854, the three diplomats put their names to a dispatch that came to be known as the Ostend Manifesto.

The dispatch was a bombshell. Written mainly by Soulé, it urged the United States to immediately buy Cuba at any price up to $120 million. It also proclaimed that if Spain refused to sell and if its possession of Cuba seriously endangered the “internal peace” of the slave states, then the United States would be justified in seizing Cuba “upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.”14

News of this saber-rattling manifesto sent shock waves through the Northern wing of the Democratic Party. They had just suffered huge election losses that fall. They had entered the election holding ninety-three seats in the House. They now had only twenty-two.15 What, many asked, was the Pierce administration up to? Didn’t they realize that the “burning house” rhetoric would provide Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune with even more ammunition to attack the party faithful? One Democratic newspaper after another thus distanced itself from the manifesto, even branding its authors “brigands” and “highwaymen.”The Pierce administration also ran for cover, disavowing the proposal and letting “the three wise men of Ostend” fend for themselves.16

That December, enraged by the reaction, Soulé resigned as minister to Spain. Several months later, in April 1855, Quitman gave back to the Cuban junta the powers it had bestowed upon him. No longer did either warrior have much hope of acquiring “the pearl of the Antilles” to offset the addition of California as a free state.

What Is Kentucky?















This shows a weird mix of Southern and Northern social patterns.












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An additional thought:














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Possible Sundown Towns In Kentucky
by James W. Loewen, University of Illinois

General Info On Sundown Towns in Tennessee
by James W. Loewen, University of Illinois

Terror in the Night
by Ron Soodalter, Kentucky Monthly


The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars
by Tracy Campbell

by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito

by Elliot Jaspin

by George C Wright

by C. Vann Woodward

Kentucky: Portrait in Paradox, 1900-1950
by James C. Klotter

Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century

Everyone Code Switches












Southern Blacks: From Old World to Americanized





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Southern Multicultural Traditions

I’m so often picking on Southerners, especially the Scots-Irish. It makes me feel like a bully.

The Scots-Irish are such an easy target, like any other oppressed minority group. Looked down upon even by many other Southerners, they get called rednecks, hillbilies, crackers and white trash. I try to balance my criticisms with my love of Appalachia and my sympathetic knowledge of my own family.

It isn’t hard to find those sore points in Southern culture and history. That is the sad result of being the losers in a civil war of your own making, an unnecessary war at that and worse still fought for a less than noble cause. History hasn’t been entirely kind in its judgment.

Still, the South is as much part of America as anywhere else, even with its past attempt at secession. Maybe so many Southerners ethnically identify as American or even Native American because they feel a strong need to prove their patriotic loyalty with the shadow of the past falling upon them. It might be similar to how many Irish in the North became uber-patriots following the draft riots that besmirched their image in the public eye.

The South typically gets stereotyped. Then again, Southerners have played a large part in creating and spreading many of these stereotypes, including proudly embracing them. But I’ve never been one to be ultimately satisfied with stereotypes, although I try to reveal any kernels of truth that may lay hidden within caricatured generalizations.

My studies of Southern history and culture has shown me how complex is the region. This shouldn’t be surprising for why would we expect the South to be simplistic in a way no other region is. This complexity, however, does seem to surprise many people.

There many examples of Southern complexity: Union supporters and soldiers, slave owners turned abolitionists, white agrarian socialists and black communist party members, small town environmentalists, clannish labor organizers, self-governed black towns during Reconstruction, wealthy black communities, and on and on. Because of my last post, the example I have in mind is multiculturalism in the South.

Multiculturalism is understandably identified with the North and the West Coast, but there has always been multiculturalism in the South as well. The big cities, of course, have always been cosmopolitan places tht attracted people with more socially liberal attitudes. Early on, Charleston was aready an immensely diverse place because of all the international trade that occurred there. But I had in mind the sub-region that is at the southenmost edge of the Deep South.

From Florida to New Orleans to Texas, the Spanish Empire has left a permanent impact and the French Empire also. The mestizo and creole cultures are fundamentally a part of the South as a region and integrally a part of Southern culture.

There is a monocultural set of traditions throughout the South. There is he monocultural clannishness of the rural and upper South. Also, there is a Cavalier and Barbados equivalent to the Puritan socio-political system of oppressive assimilation. But other traditions always existed. A semi-tolerant cultural libertarianism has always persisted in Appalachia and the Southern aristcrats often wished to be perceived as cultured cosmopolitans.

I particularly want to emphasize the mestizo and creole angle. When I recently wrote of a Mestizo Midlands as a multicultural ideal and reality, I wasn’t articulating a value system in opposition to the South. Rather, I was seeking a way to include the South within the broader American experience. If we are to have cultural unity in this country, we need to recognize the shared history that unites us.

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, & the Issues Being Discussed

The political football of the moment is the case of Trayvon Martin having been followed/stalked, shot and killed by George Zimmerman. So, let me punt.

The issues surrounding the case interest me. The case itself less so. But if not for the case, these surrounding issues would unlikely see the light of day in the MSM. This is a rare opportunity for public discussion when nearly the entire nation is paying attention, not that the issues suddenly are any more important than they are at any other time.

It’s hard to know how to talk about this subject. There are so many angles one can consider.

I’ll focus on the angle that has been my focus lately in general: race, ethnicity, culture, regionalism, clannishness, violence, culture of honor, North vs South, etc. Well, it is the focus that has been on my mind for these past few years.

What has come up in the internet chatter and the talking head babble is a constellation of factors with varying degrees of relevance or irrelvance to the case at hand (depending on one’s perspective and emphasis): neighborhood watch groups, self-defense pleas, stand your ground laws, castle doctrine, vigilante justice, gun ownership rights, concealed carry, gun violence rates, crime, legally-sanctioned vs non-legally-sanctioned violence/homicides, racial profiling, gated communities, and I’m sure many other things as well.

From what I understand, the police inform neighborhood watch groups to not carry guns. Police also tell them not to follow and confront people. George Zimmerman basically did everything he shouldn’t have been doing from a genuine self-defense perspective, although following random strangers around at night while carrying a concealed weapon isn’t illegal however inadvisable the behavior and however questionable the intentions/ethics. Well, killing defenseless and innocent minors is generally frowned upon in our society.

Zimmerman was some combination of overzealous and paranoid, whether or not one sees this as justified (by whether one shares such a overzealous, paranoid worldview). He might have genuine reasons for his fears (everyone has reasons for everything they do, morally worthy reasons or not), but that is true for people with fears that don’t lead them to shooting and killing people. Fear and homicide don’t inevitably go hand in hand. In this case, it was more than just fear. Zimmerman was frustrated and angry as well.

He had been upset because he didn’t think the police were doing their job, but he felt better when the police helped him out with the neighborhood watch group. His original criticism of the police was so strong because of the tension in the local community with crime. As he explained to the police dispatcher shortly before shooting Trayvon, “These assholes they always get away.” And there are multiple witnesses to there being racist sentiments in his family which is evidence for how we should interpret statements like this combined with his having a history of calling the police to report suspicious people who were mostly black. Anyway, he made sure Trayvon didn’t get away, even when all Trayvon was trying to do was get back home to his family.

Stalking and killing innocent people in your neighborhood is hardly an effective method of making your community safer. Just speaking for myself, I’d feel less safe knowing a gun-carrying homocidal paranoiac like Zimmerman was living in my neighborhood freely walking about with a concealed weapon ready to shoot anyone he meets based on his subjective feelings of fear… but that is just me.

This is an obvious case of vigilante justice. When put in those terms, most people immediately think of it as a moral judgment. I, however, simply am using it as a description. Almost anyone could envision a scenario where they would deem vigilante justice to be justifiable, morally even if not legally; assassinating Hitler as a straightforward example; a wife shooting her life-threatening abusive husband is another example that most people could accept or at least understand. Those who support Zimmerman see his seeking vigilante justice as perfectly reasonable and even admirable, although among his supporters not all are completely willing to get on full board with the overzealousness of his application of vigilante justice.

Many gun rights proponents often argue that there would be less crime if there were more people with guns. So, in this case, if both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had guns, then they could have had a stand-your-ground shootout which would have been the ultimate form of justice; may the fastest draw win. From what I’ve recently read, it sounds like the stand your ground laws have many unintended consequences. They’ve been successfully used as a self-defense plea by gangsters involved in gang fights and by those who left the scene of a confrontation only to later return with a gun to kill the person.

I was also recently once again looking at violence rates and murder rates in the states which fits the typical North/South divide. I would point out that an act of violence that leads to death isn’t technically murder when it is legally sanctioned or doesn’t lead to criminal prosecution. I’m sure police violence isn’t even included in the stats on violence rates. Only if the police were brought to trial and prosecuted would that particular incident of police violence be included with all the rest of the violence. This is significant as particular places are known for having more violent police forces than other places.

Also, vigilante justice and violence in general is more condoned and more common in the South (whether the condoning makes it common or the commonness leads to it being condoned). As explained by Sheldon Hackney, “In the South, there’s just more folks who need killing.” I came across an example of this. Someone was explaining how, in Texas a half century ago, a standard argument for a defense lawyer wasn’t to claim that his client didn’t kill the person but that the murder victim was of low character and had it coming to them. This argument apparently was convincing to juries at the time and led to many innocent verdicts. Such a legal defense is based on a cultural expectation that vigilante justice should be upheld by the court of law.

One sees an echo of this older Southern legal tradition in how the Zimmerman case proceeded and concluded.

I see examples of this kind of thinking in my own family.

My mother quickly went to the defense of Zimmerman. Her family is of typical Appalachian stock.

My maternal uncle Bob owns and carries guns. The last time I saw him, he told of a situation where his gun came in handy. He lives out in the country and someone knocked on his door late at night asking for car help. He went out to help the guy, but made sure to bring along his gun concealed from view. He was met by a bunch of young guys who threatened to rob him and so he pulled out his gun. They left quickly. Even though he is a hardcore Christian, he openly admits that he wouldn’t think twice about killing someone who had it coming. The important point is that he is a hardcore Christian of the Southern fundamentalist variety.

Violence as a way of maintaining order was more normal for my mother’s family. Her father would beat her and her brother to punish them. My mother and uncles lived in fear of their father, but it did maintain order in an authoritarian paternalistic kind of way.

I don’t know what my father thinks of the Zimmerman case. His view might be similar to that of my mother, but his family is a more mixed background which is demonstrated by another incident.

My paternal grandmother was born and raised in the South and her family have been in the Deep South for centuries. She moved to the Midwest when she married my paternal grandfather who was a Northerner, born in New Jersey but raised on an estate on Long Island Sound in Connecticut. My father’s parents were arguing once when he was a child and my paternal grandmother ended up shooting a gun into a chair. My paternal grandfather could get angry and moody, but he never turned to violence. That is Southern meets Northern in a nutshell.

My father takes more after his own father and his father’s Northern attitude. My dad has considered buying a gun. My dad has some right-wing tendencies such as in fearing the breakdown in society. He realizes that if society were to breakdown there would be riots and looting. One might want to have a gun in this kind of situation, but then his Northern Christian sensibility kicks in. He realizes that he wouldn’t want to be responsible for killing his own neighbors merely to protect some food. It seems unChristian to him, but killing people is perfectly Christian to the Southern fundamentalist worldview.

Read or watch some of the End Times apocalyptic entertainment put out by fundies. I have and it is a scary world as seen through their eyes. If I saw the world that way, I’d carry a gun too.

My worldview leans toward pacifism which makes sense as I born in and lived most of my life in the Quaker-founded culture of the Midlands. It’s a live-and-let-live community-minded semi-libertarianism. Like the rural South, the rural Midwest has a majority white population that is religious, supportive of gun rights and do indeed own lots of guns. Unlike the rural South, the rural Midwest has low rates of gun violence in particular and violence in general. The rural South has the highest rate of violence in the entire country. It also has higher rates of suicides, ‘accidental’ deaths, wife beatings, child abuse, etc. The South is just a dangerous place all around, whether you wish to ascribe that to a culture of honor or to clannish genetics.

Here in Iowa, I have coworkers with guns, some for hunting and some for self-defense. I have one coworker who is in the National Guard and carries a gun with him. That doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m a liberal-minded gun rights proponent, but like a good Midwesterner I also advocate for a peaceful, safe and orderly society. The high rate of violence in the South is a foreign mentality to me. I just don’t get it.

The problem isn’t necessarily the laws themselves for the laws merely are an expression of a culture. You could have a stand your ground law in Iowa and it probably wouldn’t lead to more violence as it seems to have in Southern states. So, maybe laws like this throw gas on the fire, but they didn’t start the fire.

What this recent case brings to public attention is how different the South is from the rest of the country. For a non-Southerner visiting the South, it is truly like visiting a foreign land. It isn’t dissimilar to visiting Mexico. In both cases, there is a higher chance you might get killed, even if you’re just walking down the street minding your own business.

Related to the North/South divide is the race issue.

Black culture is stigmatized as being inherently violent. This is the justification for racial profiling, as argued by those on the right. However, since white rural Southerners are the single most violent regional demographic in the US, why don’t they get profiled? If gangsta rap music is judged to promote violence, why don’t we judge redneck country music the same way? Country music is often about immoral behavior: extramarital affairs, drunkenness, fighting, etc. The older country music and mountain music can be extremely dark. So, why this racial double standard?

I was walking to my parents’ home the other night, not unlike what Trayvon Martin had been doing. It was getting a bit dark and I’m typically a bit scruffy looking. It’s an upper class neighborhood that has had some crime. The scenario was quite similar to what led to the Trayon killing, but the difference is that I’m white and I live in relatively peaceful Iowa. As a white person, I felt as safe as if I were sitting at home behind a locked door. I walked past kids and adults, none of whom knew me nor did I know them, yet no one looked at me suspiciously, followed me in a car or stalked me on foot.

Even in liberal Iowa City, racism takes its toll – as I’ve written about before: John Bior Deng: R.I.P. and John Bior Deng: Racism, Classism.

Obviously, it isn’t just about the Florida case. It is about the Southern culture that promotes vigilante justice and makes unjust violence inevitable. Maybe even more importantly, it’s about this country’s unresolved race issues which go hand in hand with this country’s unresolved regional issues. Even if the law was properly applied in this particular case, we obviously need to fix our legal system to ensure that it is a justice system. An unjust law fairly applied doesn’t a just society make.

We as a society still have a lot of soul-searching to do, if there is ever to be justice in this country. A truly just society isn’t defined by those who have it coming getting punished with death but rather is defined by the innocent not living in fear of those who think they have it coming.

* * * *

In researching this case and the issues involved, here are the interesting things I found:

As it is, and in spite of his acquittal, George Zimmerman’s life has been changed for ever. He is in hiding, a marked man now a target for a hothead’s vigilante justice – what he was accused of meting out to Trayvon Martin.

“That we can get a verdict like this, not because the system has broken down, but the system worked exactly as it was designed,” Oliver said. “How does 2013 Florida have a law that seems cut and pasted from 1881 Tombstone? Because – let’s be clear here – according to current Florida law, you can get a gun, follow an unarmed minor, call the police, have them explicitly tell you to stop following him, then choose to ignore that, keep following the minor, get into a confrontation with him and if at any point during that process you get scared, you can shoot the minor to death and the state of Florida will say, ‘Well, look, you did what you could.’”,33126/






The “Zimmerman mindset,” as Alexander calls it, is composed of more parts than mere racism. Another part of it — equally dangerous, if not more so — is the paranoid, self-important vigilante mindset that drove Zimmerman to completely ignore the advice of authorities, forget the local cops even existed, and go off on his own tear and get himself into a lot of totally unnecessary trouble, just because everyone has told him, and he’s told himself, that a man has to “stand his ground” and “retreat” of any sort is bad, even when basic common sense demands it and there’s really nothing to gain by fighting.

This wan’t just a triumph of racism, it was a triumph of juvenile libertarianism over sensible use of state power, brittle macho belligerence over prudent choice of where to make a stand and when to step back for safety’s sake. It was a triumph of childish, selfish emotion over any sort of adult reason or responsibility.

Funny how you don’t hear the Second Amendment fetishists saying that this tragedy could have been averted if only Martin had been armed and able to defend himself!

By now, if you’re even slightly in tune with issues of guns and gun violence, you also have heard a lot about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year old boy who was innocently walking through his gated neighborhood when a self-appointed neighborhood watch man, George Zimmerman, armed with a concealed weapon and feeling empowered by Florida’s “shoot first” law, took it upon himself to trail and then accost Trayvon, against the advice of 911. When the boy put up a fight, armed with nothing more than a can of tea and a bag of Skittles, Zimmerman shot Trayvon dead.

There are so many red flags with this case that it boggles the mind, such as the fact that Zimmerman had a violent past but was allowed to carry a concealed weapon anyway, the way Zimmerman ignored the 911 operator and felt obliged to get into an armed confrontation with the boy despite the fact that police were on their way, the assumption by the police of Zimmerman’s innocence, the assumption by the police of Trayvon’s guilt, the apparent stereotypes that Zimmerman had of Trayvon based on the boy’s clothing and skin color, and the lack of an arrest of the shooter.

But at least as disturbing to me as any of those things is the root of the issue, the one thing that led to the confrontation in the first place: the desire by a man with a concealed weapon to play “Wyatt Earp” and be a freelance policeman. People carry concealed handguns for two main reasons: fear of others, and a sense of self-empowerment. Fear of others can quickly become paranoia, and a feeling of self-empowerment can sometimes push people over the edge into irrational behavior in a crisis situation. Both of these things likely happened in Trayvon’s situation. Add to this the recent study that people who hold guns are more likely to imagine others being armed with guns. This, too, apparently happened in Trayvon’s shooting, where Zimmerman is heard on the 911 call saying that he thought Trayvon was holding something suspicious, like a gun.

There is an irrefutable fact: the average citizen with a conceal carry license is not even remotely trained like a policeman. They aren’t as versed in the laws, they haven’t been trained in crisis intervention, negotiation tactics, or how to remain rational or steady in a shootout, and they likely haven’t had as much practice with their weapon. Training requirements are little to none nearly anywhere in America for them, and they are less accountable to anyone for their potentially lethal decisions than law enforcement professionals. So the pro-gun daydream of saving the day with their guns is a potentially lethal one, not just for the criminal or the gun owner, but also for anyone who happens to be around them when the shootout happens.

I can understand the frustration felt by the citizens of Dorena. They just want to feel safe. Sadly, bond measures intended to fund law enforcement in this area almost always fail, and they are particularly voted against by rural voters like those in Dorena. If they want to improve their safety, arming everyone around and forming posses to come to the rescue of a victim isn’t the answer, as Trayvon’s family can now attest. The answer is better funding to improve the number of deputy patrols, as well as the many non-armed options to hardening their homes against invaders.

There are very good reasons why we have police forces instead of relying on vigilantes to protect our communities.

But thanks to Florida’s incredible sunshine laws, we know a few relevant things about Zimmerman.

In July 2005, he was arrested for “resisting officer with violence.” The neighborhood watch volunteer who wanted to be a cop got into a scuffle with cops who were questioning a friend for alleged underage drinking. The charges were reduced and then waived after he entered an alcohol education program. Then in August 2005, Zimmerman’s former fiance sought a restraining order against him because of domestic violence. Zimmerman sought a restraining order against her in return. Both were granted. Meanwhile, over the course of eight years, Zimmerman made at least 46 calls to the Sanford (Fla.) Police Department reporting suspicious activity involving black males.
We also know that Witness No. 9 accused Zimmerman of molesting her when they were children. The relative’s revelation is appalling but irrelevant. What most folks don’t know is that Witness No. 9 made an explosive allegation against her cousin. “I know George. And I know that he does not like black people,” she told a Sanford police officer during a telephone call in which she pleaded for anonymity. “He would start something. He’s a very confrontational person. It’s in his blood. Let’s just say that. I don’t want this poor kid and his family to just be overlooked.” At the end of the call, Witness No. 9 urged the officer to “get character reports from other people and see if he’s ever said anything about black people, about being racist or anything like that because I guarantee you there’s somebody out there who will say it.”
That phone call was significant because it was placed two days after Zimmerman killed Trayvon and a couple of weeks before the case drew national attention. Witness No. 9 wasn’t seeking attention. “I’m a mom,” she told police. “I can’t stand seeing that some kid got shot and killed over a stupid fight, especially one that my [redacted] … because I know who he is.”
George Zimmerman is the one who stands accused of second-degree murder. He, not Trayvon Martin, is the one on trial starting June 10. And who Zimmerman is more relevant to the proceedings than who Trayvon was.




What’s more striking in these data than the pre-/post-comparison is the sharp contrast between SYG and non-SYG states. Could it be that the SYG states are more inclined to pass such laws because they’re inured to a relatively high level of violence already?







Comments Section – InsiderMyself wrote:


“Because of the heat of the moment and stand your ground, he had a right to defend himself.”

Look what happened. Even the Times is now writing “stories” about how this law was not used here. “It’s not about stand your ground”. Bullhockey! The judges instructions to the jury are based on the LAW. And a juror said it did matter.

So why is the Times saying otherwise?

Former Sen. Durell Peaden and Rep. Dennis Baxley, two of the authors of Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, are arguing that George Zimmerman lost the right to claim protection by way of self-defense the moment he went after Trayvon Martin, and insist that the legislation itself isn’t to blame for Martin’s death.






Some people fought off intruders in their homes or businesses, which would have been allowed even before the “stand your ground” law.

The use of force resulted in 65 deaths.


How can anyone know?



That continued in 2006, the law’s first full year.

But the next three years brought these numbers:

2007: 102.

2008: 93.

2009: 105.

The first six months of 2010: 44.

They still wonder. What was wrong with Rodney that evening? Why was he acting out of character? The autopsy showed that his skull was fractured. Had he been beaten? Did he run into the trailer in fear for his life?

“It came close to killing my parents,” said Cox’s sister, Terri Cox Lavery, 44, who still combs through the police reports seven years later, looking for answers. “My mom, just this year, has gotten some of herself back.”

Her family, many of them former military, owns guns. Her husband has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. They believe in the right to bear arms and to protect your property.

“But if someone seems disoriented,” she said, “I’d like to think that we would, at a distance, first attempt to give some kind of aid and set some boundaries and call for help.”

They all agree that it’s especially insulting and hurtful that Rodney’s death is used by politicians as an example.

“The people who used this incident to pass that law, they’re not even on course,” said Autry, Cox’s uncle. “They’re not even close.”

Yet his lawyer could argue, invoking Stand Your Ground, that his client, outside the home, in the dark, waiting in ambush, “had the absolute right to defend himself inside his own home.” Before 2005, such an inside-out defense would have been dismissed as absurd. No longer.

Of course, this was just some a petty criminal, shot and killed in the act. An ex-con on probation working his way to his next conviction. Not a very sympathetic victim. But there was a time when one measure of a civil society had to do with the value it assigned to the life of even a common thief. When civil society restricted the use of deadly force to extreme, fearful, unavoidable circumstances.

Read more here:

However, where the results get really interesting is when we look at the male population of gun owners. Here’s the results that should interest you about the rate of gun ownership among me. The two highest rated sub-populations regarding gun ownership are:

Married southern men : 64%
Non-Hispanic southern white men: 61%

By contrast:

Non-southern married men: 48%
Non-Hispanic, non-southern white men: 45%

Further more, no other region of the country comes close to the South in terms of guns ownerhip. Here are the rates of gun ownership, which combine both male and female gun owners, among the various regions of the country:

Southern residents: 38%
Midwestern residents: 29%

Western residents: 27%

Eastern residents: 21%

That’s a big difference. It may reflect a cultural difference among the various regions, or it might reflect that many states outside the South have stricter gun laws. There’s no way to know, unfortunately, just based on Gallup’s raw data. However, Gallup’s data does show that women, married or not are more likely to own guns if they reside in the South versus other regions of the country.

I’ve driven through Sanford a number of times, when I was living in Jacksonville, FL. Don’t know much about it, specifically. I had a friend who lived in the town just to the north, Deltona. This part of Florida is called North Florida, and snarky comments from the rest of the South aside, it is very much part of the old South.

I have gone to the beach on the Fourth of July and seen Confederate battle flags. I have seen them on people’s trucks in Orlando, the urban center which is near Sanford. Driving North on 75 towards the Georgia border is the largest flag I’ve ever seen, fluttering over the freeway. Another Confederate flag (the first time I saw it, it froze my blood and my wife asked me where I’d taken her–she’s Black).

This is a part of Florida where, about a decade ago, a farmer was convicted of driving in to Jacksonville and offering jobs to homeless men, then keeping them imprisoned on his farm, charging them more for room and board than he paid them, and not letting them leave until their debts were paid.

In Florida, we have a “stand your ground” law. That is, you are not required to attempt to escape before you use deadly force against another. The Sanford police are attempting to say it applies, though Zimmerman is the pursuer, not the pursuee. He was the one with the gun. And I have little doubt that if it had been me walking through that neighborhood, not only would I still be alive, Zimmerman wouldn’t have bothered with me nor called the police.

But the murder of Black men by white authorities is not a crime in Florida. Not even in South Florida, the supposedly liberal part. Not even when, like ‘BG’ Beaugris, they are executed while lying on the ground.

Dumb kids are gonna be dumb kids no matter where or when, but does being a dumbass warrant a death sentence by private individuals, “just because?” Zimmerman, Martin’s murderer, hasn’t exactly won much public support. But “the homeowner” who gunned down Morrisson in the middle of the night for being on his porch? Holy Moly has there been an outpouring of support for him. A simple smell test can tell you a lot about what these murders were about. Imagine it was a white kid gunned down on a black homeowner’s porch. Perhaps some of the emminantly reasonable objections to this scenario would go like this: “Did the homeowner really have to kill this kid?” “This is not what the castle doctrine was intended for?” “Couldn’t the homeowner have retreated inside his house behind a locked door and called the cops?” Unfortunately, this is not what happened.



[ .  . . ]









The classic study of the subject is by Richard Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. In his paper “Violence and Regional Culture,” published in the American Psychologist in 1993, Nisbett examined the higher rate of violence in the U.S. south, which he notes has been established since the time of revolution. After considering possible explanations having to do with poverty, slavery, and even the region’s hotter climate, he found a different answer in a cultural vestige of pastoralism: a deep “culture of honor” in which residents place an extraordinary value on personal reputation, family, and property. Threats to these things provoke aggressive reactions, leading to higher rates of murder and domestic violence. Here is how Nisbett himself explains it:




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Southern Pre-Capitalism (& Anti-Capitalism)

I was this past week reading from The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese.

Several chapters caught my attention, but it will be long before I read more from it. The book is massive and very dense. I wasn’t planning on reading it at all for the time being, until I checked out some of the chapter titles, one of which is Chapter 21 – Between Individualism and Corporatism: From the Reformation to the War for Southern Independence,  pp. 649-679.

Corporatism is being used in a different way than most people are used to from discussions of politics and economics. The authors are speaking in terms of earlier American society. Corporations as we now know them didn’t exist in centuries past. The pre-capitalist tendencies of Southern society led them to hold onto this earlier corporatism.

A slave plantation wasn’t just a or even primarily a business. It was a social order and a way of life. Many plantation owners didn’t even have any capital (i.e., fungible wealth) for they were entirely invested in their land and slaves (i.e, non-fungible wealth) and this wealth was inherited. This life of inheritance was inseparable from indebtedness, both monetary indebtedness and social indebtedness.

It’s easy for us to judge slaveholders as the bad guys. They are certainly worthy of our criticism.

The arguments against slavery were well known since before the American Revolution. Abolitionism was a major force that led up to the revolution. Slaveholders like Jefferson and Washington had plenty of opportunity during their lifetimes to free their slaves and both spoke of doing so, but neither did so. Nonetheless, there was a case of a slaveholder who freed  around 500 slaves. The problem is freeing all your slaves suddenly made you relatively poor.

For most slaveholders, though, it was a very complex issue. Ending slavery meant the collapse of their entire society. They envisioned total chaos and horrific violence. I’m sure there was some guilty conscience involved. However, they weren’t entirely wrong. The end of slavery did end the world as they knew it.

The authors attempt to show that not everything about that society was bad. The South was a pre-capitalist society and Southerners were among the strongest critics of capitalism. They genuinely believed a different way of organizing society was possible. It’s ironic that they criticized capitalism because they saw it as enslaving whites which indicates they knew slavery was a bad thing. It’s equally ironic that the South has since so unquestioningly embraced the laissez-faire capitalism of their Civil War enemy and in doing so forsaken their own traditional values.

This pre-capitalist view of Southern society fascinates me.

I did some web searches on Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. They made for an unique couple.

Earlier in their lives, Eugene was a Marxist and Elizabeth was a feminist. Later, they both became strongly conservative. I’m not sure either ever entirely denounced those labels following their right-ward shift. I get the sense that he simply became a Marxist conservative, probably from formerly being a conservative Marxist. He certainly was anti-capitalist or mistrusting of it which is why he became attracted to Southern traditionalism as he understood it. I’m less clear about Elizabeth’s beliefs other than her shifting toward the Catholic version of traditional family values.

I can see what is appealing in the traditionally conservative Southern worldview as presented by these scholars. There is that element of corporatism which I think is the same thing as what I’ve been calling classical conservatism, but there is also that lost conservative tradition from earlier centuries that was highly critical of capitalism. Classical conservatives valued social order over all else. The paired values of capitalism and individualism was the line in the sand beyond which classical conservatism could not go. That line, however, was crossed which is why modern conservatives tend to be classical liberals instead.

In my web searches, I found some articles that are neutral and some from both sides of the political spectrum. I like to look at the diverse perspectives on two people who had diverse and non-standard ideological tendencies.

Regional Stereotypes For Fun and Profit

Further data showing regions to more or less conform to their cultural stereotypes. For the fun of it, I’ll oversimplify and exaggerate the conclusions:

  • Upper Midwesterners are conservative-minded progressives and socialists who are healthy in mind and body.
  • Appalachians are rightwing-minded regressives and corporatists who are unhealthy in mind and body.

Where Are the Country’s Least Happy and Healthy Americans? New Studies Reveal America’s “Sadness Belt”
By Melanie Foley

Gallup and Healthways recently released their annual Well-Being Index for 2012, and Appalachia was found once again to be home to some of the least healthy and happy Americans. The most striking result of last year’s Well-Being Index is that while the happiest states are spread throughout the country, the lowest ranking states are all clustered in Central and Southern Appalachia, and the region’s neighboring states.

By Les Leopold



Because it works.
