This debate has generated some curious statements, especially in this most recent personal comment.  It is surely not necessary to be a part of a collective group of people to study, analyze, and understand them--to say otherwise is mere essentialism, a position that makes the practice of history impossible.  A second problem occurs when people native to or resident in Virginia claim to speak for today's Virginians, as if there were one homogenous mass of Virginians (rather than many subdivisions with differing experiences and opinions), and as if they spoke for the entire mass.  And a third problem originates with a conflation of feeling and understanding.  Historians are concerned with what happened, how it happened, and why it happened, and less with how people may now feel about it.  Discussions of historical patterns should not be construed as telling you how to feel.  The analogy--that nobody else in the world should tell people in the U.S. how to feel about the terror!
 ist attacks of September 11--is beside the point.  Nobody has any business doing so.  However, this does not mean that international scholars have nothing to contribute about the historical patterns that have given rise to islamist terrorism and to the identification of the United States as a worthy target.  That claim, implicit in the complaint attached below, would rule out all free discussion and erect isolationist boundaries of discourse--the same claim is made by the strictures against the impertinent views of non-Virginians.  And finally, the comment is phrased in contemptuous language of the sort designed to discredit writers without addressing the content of what they have written--calling their contributions "pontificating" and so forth.  Having followed this discussion for days, it remains unclear why some participants are so defensive, and why they feel personally threatened by discussion of the past and its errors and follies.  Virginia is not unique i!
 n having errors and follies in its past; such is the nature of!
  history
.  To discuss events in Virginia's past in a negative light is not the same thing as demonizing Virginia and traducing its modern citizens.

Cheers -- Kevin Berland



On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:22:53 -0500  Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history               wrote:




For any of you who are not from the south, or Virginia [since that's  
what this list is about], to sit and pontificate and tell us in  
Virginia and the south what's wrong with us, what you know about us  
that is so much more right than what we know about ourselves, and why  
we are wrong to think and feel what we do, is as insulting and  
infuriating to us as it would be if scholars in France and Brazil and  
Korea were to sit, backed up by all the volumes they've read and the  
papers they've written, the many many references they have that put  
Americans in a very bad light [you know they could find many], and  
tell us what we are supposed to feel about 9/11 and why we are wrong  
to feel the way we do. Let's have a French scholar tell us how we are  
supposed to feel about what happened to us on 9/11. And if we feel  
otherwise, we are wrong. How would you feel about that?

Nancy

-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

--Daniel Boone

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