“Why Two North Carolina Sesquicentennial Websites?” III
Brock,
How on earth can the North Carolina Department of Archives & History claim to be inclusive when they have included no one on their Sesquicentennial committee but their own employees, and an academic board composed of state employees receiving checks from state universities? Do they think we are all hicks out here? And why didn’t they include anyone representing the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans? Isn’t this a group of stakeholders that were intentionally left out of the inclusion? Or private historical societies or institutes? Archives & History may call what they do inclusion, but it looks like exclusion to this old country boy.
I am finding it more and more difficult to trust an academic from a state-supported university, you and I know that those schools maintain strict thought and speech codes. Certainly if they spoke or taught anything but the acceptable mantras, they would be fired.
And there are those who hide behind the veil of “professional” historians as if this is the only standard of measuring historical truth. I am wary of historians who are on someone’s payroll, especially a government agency that establishes expectations and outcomes of research. Seems that they decide upfront what they want people to believe, then selectively find facts and documents that narrowly support what was already preordained. This is what that state agency did with that 1898 reparations nonsense a few years ago, and this destroyed NC Archives & History’s credibility as far as I am concerned.
The “amateur” historian is under no influence but his or her own biases and prejudices – which the reader can ascertain pretty quickly. I think I would put more trust in well-documented and written historical works of the latter. That’s another two-cents worth.
Walthazy
How on earth can the North Carolina Department of Archives & History claim to be inclusive when they have included no one on their Sesquicentennial committee but their own employees, and an academic board composed of state employees receiving checks from state universities? Do they think we are all hicks out here? And why didn’t they include anyone representing the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans? Isn’t this a group of stakeholders that were intentionally left out of the inclusion? Or private historical societies or institutes? Archives & History may call what they do inclusion, but it looks like exclusion to this old country boy.
I am finding it more and more difficult to trust an academic from a state-supported university, you and I know that those schools maintain strict thought and speech codes. Certainly if they spoke or taught anything but the acceptable mantras, they would be fired.
And there are those who hide behind the veil of “professional” historians as if this is the only standard of measuring historical truth. I am wary of historians who are on someone’s payroll, especially a government agency that establishes expectations and outcomes of research. Seems that they decide upfront what they want people to believe, then selectively find facts and documents that narrowly support what was already preordained. This is what that state agency did with that 1898 reparations nonsense a few years ago, and this destroyed NC Archives & History’s credibility as far as I am concerned.
The “amateur” historian is under no influence but his or her own biases and prejudices – which the reader can ascertain pretty quickly. I think I would put more trust in well-documented and written historical works of the latter. That’s another two-cents worth.
Walthazy
From Free North Carolina
posted by Brock Townsend at
1/20/2012
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