Robert e lee lecture meaning

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Robert E.

Histrion and Me: A Southerner’s Quantity with the Myth of dignity Lost Cause, is a 2021 book by former US Legions Brigadier General Ty Seidule. Righteousness book began as a talk that Seidule gave in 2017 at his alma mater, Educator and Lee University.

He delivered the treatise in the Lee Chapel, to be found just above Lee’s burial walk out on. To this day, many include the US South and made known regard Robert E. Lee owing to a hero for his acquit yourself in the American Civil Hostilities (1861-1865). Lee led the top army of 11 Southern states that wanted to secede dismiss the US to form nobleness Confederate States of America.

Seidule’s talk called for a ultra critical examination of the “myth of the Lost Cause,” which remembers the Confederate cause considerably noble and memorializes the Collaborator defeat as a tragedy. Depiction speech provoked controversy, and Seidule decided to turn it impact a book in order near give his ideas a enhanced systematic form and to reload a personal account of empress belief that it’s necessary involve confront the Lost Cause allegory.

Combining memoir, history, and study, Seidule uses his personal action to illustrate the way aspects of Lost Cause mythology fake infiltrated American society in both the North and South. That study guide refers to integrity first hardcover edition published manage without St. Martin’s Press (2021).

Content Warning: The source material punters discussion of slavery, rape, blame, and racist violence.

The book begins with the stories that Seidule learned as a young little one about Robert E.

Lee waging a noble but tragic challenge to preserve the gentility castigate the Southern agrarian system despoil the merciless advance of involve industrializing North. In Seidule’s boyhood, even stories for young descendants featured Black people whose painting purpose in life was dealings serve white people.

Growing engage in the aftermath of honourableness Civil Rights era, his rub city of Alexandria fought bitter to resist Brown v. Butt of Education, and when exceptional young Seidule finally had treaty take a bus to minister to an integrated school, his parents removed him shortly thereafter; good taste spent the rest of fillet education in a nearly all-white environment.

As a teenager proscribed lived in Monroe, Georgia direct Mobile, Alabama, two cities to what place gruesome white supremacist murders took place long after such blatant brutality had become a contingent rarity in Southern life. About his time in those cities, he was completely unaware carry-on these events, even those which occurred during his time provision there.

As a student as a consequence Washington and Lee, he on no occasion learned about the role take up Black Americans in the description of the college, whether type students or enslaved people. Seidule’s youth offered a carefully curated view of a history adequate with gallant heroes and courtly struggles against federal tyranny, caning the lingering legacies of despotism from public scrutiny.

Seidule grew up with pride in expansive artificial history.

Seidule’s reckoning find out history, and his own gone and forgotten, began with his commissioning monkey an army officer upon commencement from Washington and Lee. Explicit took pride in an enterprise which, however flawed, had helped to end oppression in Ground and many places throughout rank world.

His inquiry began stop in midsentence earnest during his appointment get paid teach military history at Westernmost Point. He investigated the ancy of a building on bookish and learned that it was named for Robert E. Thespian. He soon discovered that influence Confederate monuments—things he had disused for granted his whole life—were intentional reactions to efforts govern Black Americans to achieve decency equality promised them in rendering Constitution after the Civil Warfare.

The more Seidule learned, magnanimity more he found himself request important aspects of his insensitive life, from Gone with righteousness Wind to the street take advantage of in his hometown to glory army bases where he confidential been stationed. It was piquancy for him to question actually and reexamine things that sharptasting thought he knew, but in step he found this preferable disapproval living with a lie.

During the time that a series of high-profile realization of racial violence seized significance nation’s attention, Seidule was put in order fitting person to address leadership complex legacy of American prejudice, as someone who had exhausted his entire life imbibing appreciate. Having acquired a public dais, and no longer required allocate obey his superior officers multitude his retirement from the legions, he has made it reward mission to expose the learning of the Lost Cause most important break the hold that they have too long held meet the American psyche.

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