History, memory, and forgetting

Recommended reading from yesterday's Sunday Times: Historian Edward Ball explaining that the "states' rights" argument has always been bullsh*t, and that the Civil War was, indeed, and of course, about slavery. Great op-ed about the southern secession movement that started the Civil War.

And also: Jill Lepore on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's abolitionism, as expressed in his poem "Paul Revere's Ride."

And, last but not least, an article in today's paper about some Tea Partiers, notably in Virginia, proposing a Constitutional amendment that would make it possible for states to repeal Congressionally-enacted legislation. Sounds suspiciously like nullification, if you ask me - nullification being the discredited Constitutional theory that led to a crisis in South Carolina in 1832 and later to the Civil War.

Curiously, the last article barely references the historical antecedents of the current nullification movement.