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In the June 1969 issue of Civil War History — Volume 5, Number 2, pages 116-132 — a renowned Southern historian attacked the legacy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
"No single war figure stands in greater need of reevaluation than Lee," wrote Thomas L. Connelly, the late University of South Carolina professor. "One ponders whether the South may not have fared better had it possessed no Robert E. Lee."
Connelly's essay was among the first academic musket shots fired on Lee's standing as an outmatched but not outwitted military genius presiding over a Lost Cause — a reputation celebrated in fawning biographies and monuments like the one removed Friday in New Orleans.
Was General Lee overrated? Get your armchair historian on...
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The Truth About Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: He Wasn’t Very Good at His Job
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innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 12 2017, @12:58PM
I'm tolerable good at analogies. I'll try to squirt out two good ones.
This is similar to endless Monday morning quarterbacking about how "640K should be enough for anyone" and all that crap. I was THERE in the old days and a lot of stuff didn't last very long so planning for the future was really stupid. In fact the true story of the early years of computing isn't boring increases in speed and storage numbers, but increases in the lifespan of ... everything. Back in the 70s and early 80s anything that worked was already obsolete and going in the trash can in a year or two, its unimaginable at the time that MSDOS would have a decade long run. Sure at the time the IBM PC was genius. Sure 20 years later looking back its total WTF were they thinking time. Both concepts are true at the same time.
Another weaker analogy would be retconning simple shell script init scripts as being impossible in order to push the narrative that we need systemd. Of all the shit I did in the 90s and 00s with linux, and I did some crazy stuff, the meme that the most difficult thing I ever done was write an init script is post-systemd and a very recent invention. To some extent the only way something common and obvious can be overturned a zillion years after its widely accepted is if someone's got an extreme agenda to push. If by some miracle systemd were never invented, would anyone give a F about init scripts, which are after all pretty easy sysadmin task? Naw. Likewise unless a modern narrative requires it nobody is going to flip the script on the general opinion of Julius Caesar or Desert Fox Rommel or ... General Lee. But the narrative needed pushing so the Lee statues are getting shoved over.