April 12 is quite a day in my memories, as "This Day In History" reminds me with my first email of the day. And my mind links it with the sinking of the Titanic a couple days later in 1912.
Anyway, the culmination of the political fight over slave states versus free states, with slave states seceding from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, was our Civil War, or, as many Southerners preferred to call it, The War Between The States. With enormous bloodshed, the war lasted four years, and the bitterness and gnashing of teeth was still very much alive in the South during my growing years.
Memories from my childhood include everyone standing and cheering whenever "Dixie" was played; and open top touring cars (four door convertibles) with aged Confederate veterans in gray uniform bringing up the end of every parade up Harrison Avenue, to applause of the crowds lining the sidewalks to watch the parade; legal and vigorously enforced, a racially segregated culture and social order throughout the South. It was part of our Southern culture, "true facts that we grew up knowing for certain," that the Yankees had won but we were in the right.
OMG, Oh My God, the hatreds, passion, unspeakable evil and lasting damage brought upon humankind over the ages, by political certainty and religious certainty; religious certainty being the most cruelly, viciously, pathetically, unconscionably wicked, and the greatest, most egregious sin. For example,
Another April 12 listed below, "Galileo is accused of heresy" by a dogmatically certain Christian Church. Accused, tried, condemned, but spared to live under house arrest. The history of religions brutalizing outsiders and dissidents is horrendous, e.g., in the Bible read the Book of Joshua about conquest of the Holy Land. At this point in the evolution of the human race, we are so far from the likeness and image of God in which we were created, that ... the word is ineffable.
Wandering, Mr B.
And, yep, "Rock around the clock tonight, gonna rock, rock, rock till broad daylight, gonna rock around the clock tonight ... "
In my own Time, recalled here any number of Times already, the death of President Roosevelt stunning us, a nation at war; but actually opening up a new White House era with an even better president.
RSF&PTL
T
| Civil War begins as Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter |
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| Four of the bloodiest years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 round... read more |
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| ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY |
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