Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >
> > But I actually got choked up when I visited Little Round Top on the
> Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago, and saw flowers heaped where Joshua
> Chamberlains' 20th Maine Volunteers held off Hoods Alabamans and Texans the
> second day of the battle, then charged with bayonets with they were out of
> ammo, probably saving the Union.
You did choose the one war in u.s. history that was legitimate from start to finish. (The "start _to finish_" criterion excludes WW2.)
At one of our anti-war coalition meetings last fall I pointed out (I forget the exact context) that I opposed _particular_ wars and I cited the War to Suppress the Slavedrivers Insurrection and WW2 in part as instances I approved of. Later a woman I hadn't known before told me she was in the history department at ISU, and her field of specialization was the Civil War. And she said that she _was_ a pacifist, but in respect to the Civil War her convictions faltered. For decades (even before I became involved in left politics), the one social situation in which I have ever been even nearly as rude as I am occasionally on this list was whenever someone echoed the stupid praise of that fucking traitor Robert E. Lee.
Carrol
P.S. I must do a fairly good job of concealing my professorial history. I was chatting with that same woman a few weeks ago, and when I made some reference to faculty affairs, she was surprised that I had been on the faculty. :-)