Judging historical people on today's social standards. . .

[L Verge]

(12-03-2019 01:03 PM)Mylye2222 Wrote:  

(12-03-2019 09:53 AM)Dennis Urban Wrote:  

(12-02-2019 02:09 PM)LincolnMan Wrote:  

(12-02-2019 01:26 PM)Mylye2222 Wrote:  You simply can't judge historical characters by today's standards. To understand them, you have to appreciate the whole environment they were living in. Today's political correcteness and repentance culture requires to dimiss history and revise it. Revisionism is politically motivated, and in the worst way.
Example :Had Lincoln racial préjudice? Yes he had some. Was he a racist?? By today's standards, kind of!! But for a man of his era, he was far less racist than his contemporaries. Plus, over time, the few prejudices he may have harbored decreased.

Absolutely agree.

Kudos to Mylye222 for expressing this sentiment which I have also long advocated (and welcome to the forum). I do a fair number of speaking engagements every year and I always advise my audience to better understand history by reading period first-hand accounts and not to try to judge what was in people's minds at the time based on today's revisionist historians' writings. No one today can truly assess what the people living at the time actually thought other than reading their own words. Deal with their thoughts, based on their experiences, as they expressed them in their letters and writings. Letters, diaries, and writings of the common folks are most important in this regard. I will now step off the soap box.

Thank you for your appreciation. I am in France and over there repentance culture is becoming more and more frightening. For us it regards colonization.

I am appreciating your term "repentance culture." In my region of the U.S. (twelve miles from the U.S. Capitol building), the epitaph "white guilt" is what is most frequently thrown at us - or at least insinuated. My head will be severed from my neck for this comment, but I feel neither repentant nor guilty for the society that existed over 100 years before I was born. And yes, my ancestors held slaves...