My Favorite New Blog

OK, it's not a new blog at all, but I just discovered it, so it's new to me: Old Picture of the Day by PJM. Each day there's a new old picture, as the blog's title suggests. The photos are from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and PJM posts pictures from his own collection as well as those that his readers send in. He also has name the mystery person contests, which look fun.

The only negative I've seen is the PJM's and many of his commenters' insistence on calling themselves "southern sympathizers," meaning that they were sympathetic to the "states' rights" cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. This pops up in the discussion of many of the Civil War photographs posted on the blog (the post linked in the image above is one example of this). Being from the south, I've met many "southern sympathizers" in my day. They're the sort who insist that slavery was just an unfortunate, small part of the case for southern secession, though it's difficult to tell whether they think it's unfortunate because slavery was morally evil or because it made the Confederacy look like the bad guy of the Civil War. Of course, slavery was the cause of secession. Without slavery, there would have been no Confederate States of America, and no American Civil War. Historical research is pretty much unequivocal on this issue. And as a result of the role of slavery in the Civil War, "states' rights" has become a sort of code word for racism in the south. I don't mean to imply that the blog's author or its commenters are racist, as I know nothing about them personally. I do want to note, however, that they're trading in historical revisionism, and that by calling themselves southern sympathizers, they are associating themselves with the worst sort of southern racists, both in history and today.