Rewriting history is almost always a dangerous proposition especially when it serves the predominant ideology of the day!
Erasing the names of individuals who are now considered to be politically incorrect is terrible propaganda!
How far will the senile and demented 46th President and his largely incompetent administration go in these efforts!
Some of the views of this Yale scholar, i.e. Mr. Connor Williams, are quite dubious if not schocking (see e.g. my highlighted excerpt below)!
By 1861, it was already very obvious that slavery was going to be phased out by many Western countries in particular by Great Britain! E.g. the British Empire abolished the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. See also e.g. the history of Abolitionism. Thus, a war over ending slavery was highly unnecessary!
The American Civil War was not about slavery, but about preventing secession and dominance of the industrial northern/eastern states over the more agrarian southern states!
"... His job as lead historian was to ensure that the commissioners got their history right. He advised them as they considered renaming or altering the hundreds of U.S. Department of Defense assets — bases, roads, buildings, monuments, and military insignias — that celebrate those who betrayed the United States in defense of slavery. He also helped write the historical sections of their reports to Congress and recommended new names for some bases.
Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III approved the commission’s recommendations, including the renaming of the nine bases, and ordered that the changes be implemented by Jan. 1, 2024. ...
"The case began with this fact: Whatever one wants to think about the Confederates — whatever they believed about states’ rights or the right to secede from the Union — they were insurrectionists who unquestionably killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. Army soldiers. [?????] This is where history really helps because many people sincerely believe that during the war, the United States had split into the Union and the Confederacy — separate, equal nations each with its own government." ..."
"The case began with this fact: Whatever one wants to think about the Confederates — whatever they believed about states’ rights or the right to secede from the Union — they were insurrectionists who unquestionably killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. Army soldiers. [?????] This is where history really helps because many people sincerely believe that during the war, the United States had split into the Union and the Confederacy — separate, equal nations each with its own government." ..."
Fort Polk, a U.S. Army installation in Louisiana named after Confederate General Leonidas Polk, soon will be renamed after Sergeant Henry Johnson, a Black American soldier who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2015 for valor during World War I.
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