Saturday, February 07, 2009

Lincoln's Ethics and the Great Sioux Uprising



Check it out.

~mft

3 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

Interesting and substantive piece of video history.
On the rhetorical side of things, the sandwiching of that Dakota Swede scholar kid by two slabs of tough looking "Think I'm a Sioux, huh, huh?" hombre was a stroke of genius.
The subtext of History, indeed.

Arelcao Akleos said...

Long before the phrase, Lincoln was a "buck stops here" kind of guy. As the video said, it would have been very easy, in far away DC, with the nation indifferent to everything but the unfolding war, to have played Pontius Pilate and let the local commanders decide the issue. Character tells.

My Frontier Thesis said...

When we hear about Lincoln, in the temporal sense from afar, it's easy and reasonable to think, "Yeah, it's been a myth: he wasn't really that great of a guy..." But upon careful scrutiny, we realize that oh-no, he really was that great of a human, concerned with the broad events and deliberate with the micro too.

And yes, Dakota is a good friend of mine. I've told him Portuguese stories as well. Someday we'll have to all sit down for coffee and tea.