re: The Harriet Tubman legend is literally a myth invented by 2 Communist writers

Maybe. I'm mostly annoyed that people think black activists are somehow not worthy of being celebrated, as in my first response in this thread. Within the broader post-colonial context, the US Civil Rights movement of that era was singular and amazing in several respects. That is something that should be mentioned more, especially given things like Philippeville and Sharpsville occurred during the same time period.

Bro, the actual literature on Civil Rights and Reconstruction is far more somber in tone and analysis than the popular versions of that get told. As others have pointed out, myth-making is its own thing but there are plenty of interesting things in the primary source documentation that are fascinating in their own right.

You desperately need to read some books lady. Log off for a while.

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Well. . .considering the book you cited claims she rescued over 300. . .yeah

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Friend Garrett probably refers here to those who passed through his hands. Harriet was obliged to come by many different routes on her different journeys, and though she never counted those whom she brought away with her, it would seem, by the computation of others, that there must have been somewhere near three hundred brought by her to the Northern States and Canada.

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Someone said.

She never said.

Do you think leading dozens to freedom is not laudable?

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Because it isn't all her recollections. The letters weren't written by her, she was illiterate.

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Now days we assume people who are illiterate are stupid.

That's a very strange assumption for anyone who was a female slave.

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Most of what people know of her is a complete fabrication.

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Was she a slave?
Did she escape?
Did she go back multiple times to free others?
Did she have a bounty on her head?
Did she not work to support the Union Army?

Are any of those facts debatable?
What else do people know about her?

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There is a reason why Wyatt Earp is so controversial a figure. Nearly everything we know about him, he wrote.

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You are not going to like it when you find out about Julius Caesar...

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Yeah that's in response to your entire persona. I read a shite ton too.

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Thanks for this. I'm learning tonight, which is sometimes hard here.

I don’t think we actually disagree about evidence. The Maxwell piece is solid historical work, and correcting factual embellishment matters.

Where I think we’re talking past each other is the word “myth”. I’m not using it to mean “false claim”, but in the narrative sense (how societies frame facts into stories about agency, morality, change, etc).

Even evidence-based history still requires interpretation - what we emphasize, what's downplayed, what lessons we implicitly teach once the facts are established.

The irony is that demythologizing figures like Harriet Tubman doesn’t remove values. It often replaces one story with another about what kinds of political action are legitimate or effective.

That isn't anti-history. It’s just being honest about how meaning gets made after the evidence is in. Even the most evidence-based history still has to answer implicit questions about significance and causation, because that’s how people make sense of the past in the first place. (I.e. all history will be mythologized).

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he Civil War, so-called was fought to free the slaves is laughably absurd.

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I've spent a fair amount of time up North. Aint no way those people are marching South 150 years to lay their life down on southern soil all for the purpose of freeing a slave. Hell, I'm not sure they would even do it today.

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That isn't anti-history. It’s just being honest about how meaning gets made after the evidence is in. Even the most evidence-based history still has to answer implicit questions about significance and causation, because that’s how people make sense of the past in the first place. (I.e. all history will be mythologized).

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There is also the tendency to retry history based on current standards.

Much of history does not have collaborating sources or "accurate numbers".

Small events written down may seem larger than large events unwritten.

Modern historians tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater, dropping historical narrative for genetic studies and dig sites.

But the historical record is often shockingly accurate across millennia
The Narmer Palette aligns with Ptolemaic era Priest records of the unification of upper and lower Egypt, 3,000 years before.

Both of those came down via basically propaganda pieces, but they were accurate and describe a real event.

Are you noticing? Seems like you are noticing.

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Well, hell… even google says it’s a bunch of exaggerated BS.

They literally teach this in schools.

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There's a lot of stuff like that.

Look up the Miller Urey Experiment. Specifically, look up how discredited it is and how many times it's been debunked by failed attempt to recreate it.

Yet any high school or even college level texbook will tell you that life began on earth in a primordial slime in which just the right amino acids happened to exist, activated by lightning or volcanic vents or some other energy source.

And the textbook will cite the MU Experiment as the source for that "knowledge."

It's one of the most discredited theories ever, but it's still presented as valid by just about every mainstream (non academic) source you can find.

Fred Hoyle calculated the odds of life happening that way—given what we now know about DNA that wasn't known then—at 1 in 10 to the 40,000 power.

For reference, the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is roughly 1 x 10 to the 80th power.

In other words, the probability of life happening that way approaches zero. Yet it's stll the official story (and we know why).