Best us civil war women history books according to redditors

I've known a fair number of people who have changed from red tribe to blue as you describe, but I've also known plenty of people who were born blue tribe to relatively moderate parents, and then evolved into a kind of heightened or radicalized version of their blue tribe values in high school or college for a while (which usual involves things like militant veganism) until they burn themselves out, in a way that is not too dissimilar to equivalents on the right (say fundamentalist Muslim children of moderate assimilated Muslim immigrant parents, or super Southern Baptist or Mormon children of pretty moderate Southern Baptist or Mormon parents, something I experienced first hand a lot).

There is a kind of idealism underneath this that makes a great deal of sense for the young - they shared their parents values, but don't understand why they aren't living up to them.

I don't know of modern research on these patterns, but as a nice (older) example of exactly this kind of phenomenon, here's an interesting Atlantic piece from 1967, talking about the Haight in San Francisco, and the rise of hippies.

The following paragraph from that piece stuck with me back when I read it:

"Many hippies lived with the help of remittances from home, whose parents, so straight, so square, so seeming compliant, rejected, in fact, a great portion of that official American program rejected by the hippies in psychedelic script. The 19th Century Was A Mistake The 20th Century Is A Disaster. Even in arrest they found approval from their parents, who had taught them in years of civil rights and resistance to the war in Vietnam that authority was often questionable, sometimes despicable. George F. Babbitt, forty years before in Zenith, U.S.A., declared his hope, at the end of a famous book, that his son might go farther than Babbitt had dared along lines of break and rebellion."

Likewise, the following really good history book about radicals on both the left and right in the 60s, which performed a bunch of first hand interviews with activists from that era, found that, while there was some of what we'd call red-to-blue crossover, many, many of the activists had, essentially, their parents values, but often with a much harder, more radicalized edge. Many of the young left-wing organizers in the 60s were explicitly atheist Jews who had abandoned their parents Reform Judaism while largely sharing their basic values and world view. Many of the young right-wing organizers of the era were the less moderate children of somewhat more moderate Catholic immigrant parents.

Granted, this last example is talking about particular exceptional people, outliers.

Even now, I get the sense that a big source of momentum behind the rise of the Alt-Right / Intellectual Dark Web / Jordan Peterson / whatever is that there is a giant of cohort of young men who abandoned the Religious Right / Moral Majority religious framework of their parents, who nevertheless respond positively to something like a rehabilitated secular vision of conservatism, and who find a lot of progressive values and rhetoric alien and, ultimately, off-putting, once progressivism got out of its defense crouch and started making full-throated claims on its values after Obama had been in office for a while.

But this is all just my impressions and musing. I would be extremely interested in knowing some actual demographic data about all this stuff.

Pillaging, burning, rape. Hell there’s an entire book called I Had Rather Die: Rape In The Civil War

Ooof, I'm Korean and when I went to University I majored in history. One semester I wrote a term paper and have a presentation on Comfort Women....


Holy shit, I read numerous first hand testimonials, the UN human rights report, and quite a few books written on the topic.


That was one of the longest semesters of my life, ended up heavily depressed.

While it is hard to believe, believe it. In courthouses in Georgia and Mississippi, marriage records were segregated in some places until well into the 1970s. I'm sure this was true in other states as well, but these are places where I have done research. Meaning that white marriages were recorded in one set of books and black marriages were recorded in another. Since that was going on at a document level, you'd better believe that "color coding" is woven into the fabric of American life.

I have regularly asked a basic university US history class (wide assortment of students since it is a required class) in a deep south state, "How many of you went to high schools with a black prom and a white prom?" The majority respond that they did so. While certain cases have gotten media attention, there are still many, many high schools in the South that host segregated proms.

The underground railroad refers to a 19th century movement that was alive between the 1830s until slavery was made illegal. Parts of it were organized and connected and others, not so much. Most of the people who participated in the UGRR were abolitionists and they were, overall, a small group.

During the time of Cab Calloway's performance, it was considered chic for blacks and whites to go hear jazz in Harlem. In fact, he performed in clubs that he was not legally allowed to attend as a paying customer.

Even earlier, listening to slaves singing was a touristy thing to do for visitors to plantations. Many wrote of it.

One of the best books to describe Jim Crow, and the degree to which things were "color coded" is Trouble in Mind by Leon Litwack. Yes, it is long and grueling, but well worth the read if you really want a good idea of what segregation in the US was like, in a variety of places and amongst a variety of people.