Horrible Harvest

I’m a Southerner by birth, and I spent most of my formative and adult life in the South. I have been fortunate to have lived in nearly ever regional enclave in this country beyond that. It’s given me a broad perspective of the many diverse and in some cases, diametrically opposed cultures from mountain tops to fruited plain. But my own personal origin story is set in the South. As a result I have a fascination with the Civil War. The one burning question I have always had is, “What the fuck was the South thinking?”

It’s the question that is the driving force behind the story of Augustus Tennyson here on this blog. I wanted to understand systemic racism. I’m a white man, and as a result, I have a blind spot to the entire mechanism of racism so deeply ingrained that it goes largely unnoticed by folks with my same pigmentation. We’re not victims of it, so we don’t really know what it is.

My deep dive began late in life, in 2020 to be exact. I started my learning journey with Professor David Blight at Yale University. I wasn’t a student there. I’m not nearly that smart. His course on The Civil War and Reconstruction is available for free on Youtube. If you have the same curiosity I have, I encourage you to watch the entire 27 episode lecture series at your leisure. He makes the material highly consumable and educational at the same time.

Below is the introduction.