Since the Lee monument was FINALLY removed from the Capital today, I thought it would be fun to look back at the moment of national unity in 1910 that brought it there in first pla- oh, wait, no, the opposite happened.

Here's New York's GAR with a WTF and a GH Thomas namedrop

Here's Indiana, New Jersey, South Dakota, Delaware, New Mexico, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania with a double shotted "aw hell no"
Vermont with a "get lost"
https://t.co/WdaJaPto0U
From the same article, Kansas nearly sending a John Brown monument, which would've been EPIC:
The debate was pretty hot in the GAR encampment of 1910 ( https://t.co/f88VlJVeyd some were for letting bygones be bygones.. The nation was united now, right? Then this dude from Georgia spoke up:
Albert Sholes - who'd served with two Rhode Island units in the war - went on to quote this letter from a son of a Confederate officer. The Lost Cause was growing fanatical in the second generation:
One reason this was a divisive issue was because the idea of a pension for US Army Civil War veterans was going through Congress, and many GAR members didn't want to rock the boat, such as this one:
Kansas striking back again:
Some GAR representatives were saying that if the GAR made a fuss about the Lee monument, it might be a rough time for the GAR members in the south, to which Indiana replied:
I'll leave you with the words of the representative from Illinois, Jasper Darling, who prophesied what compromise and "reconciliation" would bring:
Darling, a soldier from Massachusetts in the war, was an adamant opponent of the Lost Cause narrative and was NOT a fan of Lee, btw. Here's a sample:
https://t.co/nrPFFebkeE

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We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹