Ivyspice, it is possible to remember the mistakes of the past without having to celebrate them. You don't get on the phone and call everyone in your family when your child loses a soccer game or gets a bad grade, do you? But you do when they do something worthy of celebration. So too with a society's history. While you want to remember and learn from mistakes, it is the acomplishments which should be the primary focus. Should MLK be remembered as a great leader, or an adulterous plagerist? According to you, we should focus just as much on his faults as his acomplishments. I have to ask - why? He was a man, and as such, imperfect. But his ideas are how he distinguished himself -and so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is his ideas and acomplishments which should be remembered on his holiday, not his failings.
As far as history goes, the sanitizing often conisists of the victors totally demonizing the enemy, instead of objectively studying what led to the conflict and trying to learn from it. This is true for just about any war, including dare I say the current conflict.
Most people who want me to feel guilty for slavery don't have a clue as to the actual history of the pre-War U.S.A. I do, and I don't have any reason to feel guilty. My ancestors owned slaves at a time when it was an accepted practice. Slavery was wrong, it was abolished, and that's that. More important than trying to make me feel guilty about the way society was 150 years ago is to focus on what can be done TODAY.
Instead of castigating me for the institutuion of slavery, how about focusing that energy on anger at the way the largely black population of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast have been treated by the Federal government? You want to tell me that had a similar tragedy happened in, oh, New York, we would have the same shameful treatment?That same Federal government that my ancestors thought were overstepping their bounds - near as I can tell, they were right to be worried then, and I'm worried now!

Don't worry, neither do I, and I've grown up/went to school/lived in New England my whole life. If you look on this board, you'll see criticisms come on both sides (North criticizing South, South criticizing North), so I don't think anyone can say that one side is more guilty than the other.

I sincerely doubt that there would be ANY country or group of people who claim a perfectly moral high ground. And as a genealogist, I feel that everyone should have pride in their ancestory to the extent that it's DNA, not something the descendant did. I had ancestors on both sides - it would be silly for me to claim one over the other.

BTW, Love your signature!

LA= lower alabama, my family does this too.

But they sacrificed to protect their land at a time when THAT was an accepted practice. They were chivalrous at a time when THAT was an accepted practice. Are you proud of that? How come there's no "that's that" about their sacrifice and chivalry?

Re shameful parts of MLK's life, yes, we should try to understand the whole picture of an individual if we're doing a biographical analysis. If you're studying the whole civil rights movement, though, MLK's private life really didn't play much of a role, especially since it wasn't publicized at the time. It's a very poor comparison to the role of slavery in the antebellum South (foundation of the economy, greatest concentration of wealth, preserved permanently in the Confederate Constitution, etc.).

Or maybe that his name isn't really Martin Luther to start off with, it's Micheal, he never had it legally changed.

My family has throughout its history fought to protect their country - from my Revolutionary War ancestors to my father, a former Air Force pilot and CIA operative, and brother the former Marine. Soooo . ..I take pride in that because it is a tradition that has continued to the present day. It is not just something enshrined in the past - it is a continuing defining characteristic of my family.
My family is still well-mannered - again, a family tradition that is of long standing. I take pride in those traditions that have been handed down through the generations and are still practiced.
We don't own slaves today, so why would I feel guilty for something we don't practice? For that matter, the majority of those who joined and founght for the Confederacy didn't own slaves. They did, however, believe in the concept of state's rights. They did believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence and the concept of consent of the governed. Virginia, for example, explicitly retained upon joining the Union the right to secede. Why should I feel guilty when they chose to exercise their right to do so? And more to the point, why is it so important to make me feel guilty? So you can feel somehow superior and self-righteous?
No thanks - I'm opting out. There will always be those who want to castigate the South and I fear that there is nothing that can be logically argued to those who wish to do so. I'm following St. Augustine's sage advice.

My family fought to keep all you whitey's the hell outta our country, but your smallpox infested blankets brought us down :mad: :cool:

....that and whiskey.

:D Good point :)

But, keep the faith!:D

No, they didn't. If they believed in the words of the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal...endowed by their creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), then they wouldn't have owned slaves. That applies, of course, to all the slaveholders from north and south who signed (and wrote) the Declaration of Independence. Hypocrites all. Clearly, they didn't actually believe in those things; they believed in what was good for them, and they dressed up their economic and political self-interest with pretty phrases. It took a couple of hundred years for us to get close to applying the beautiful language they wrote to all the Americans it ostensibly covered.

Most of us would be very suspicious of a man who claimed to revere his Nazi ancestors solely for their dedication, sacrifice, and commitment. They were accomplices in a horrific crime against humanity that was socially acceptable at that time and place. If playing that role is forgivable when it comes to slavery, it ought to be forgivable when it comes to the Holocaust, too. Are we willing to forgive our predecessors' roles in all crimes against humanity, or only some?

You might rethink that statement.

I might, if you offered some kind of support for your apparent disagreement.

Do you have some sources showing that in Germany in 1938 it was socially unacceptable to join the SS, or that lots of Germans were ostracized by their friends and neighbors for turning people in to the Gestapo, or that ordinary people didn't dare show their faces in public after attending a pro-Hitler rally? Because if there were no negative social consequences to doing those things, then they were, by definition, socially acceptable.

Yeah, I do. I also just wrote a 30 page paper concerning the German Resistance to Hitler and the Third Reich. If you want some sources, let me know.