James Slick Loc: Pittsburgh,PA

Yeah, Your right. We should not do our part to preserve history at all. And you are also right. I mean it's not like WWII was important or anything.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

It isn't being thrown away. It is part of history and a product of the times. Slavery was and still is evil. So is discrimination whether based on color, ethnicity, religion, appearance, gender, or sexual preference.

The US civil war history is what it is. Nobody can change that. The monuments are being used as symbols by various factions for current political purposes which is a real problem in current society. We are experiencing riots, murder, and mayhem as a result of that.

We need to do what we can to remove those symbols to avoid their misuse, but they should not be destroyed. History, and its symbols need to be preserved, but not displayed in high profile situations where they can be used to support extremist viewpoints or cause significant offense to the population.

The monuments and associated history need to be protected, which may mean moving them to different locations so that they cannot be used as excuses for extremist behavior by any faction.

Germany has done pretty good job of dealing with its history. We could learn a lot by following that example.

Bobspez Loc: Southern NJ, USA

There's a guy in the neighborhood that flies a large threadbare confederate flag from his porch on holidays. It's a middle class diverse neighborhood. Black, white, hispanic, middle eastern, everyone gets along. I just scratch my head when I walk past that flag.

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

I had a couple hundred old pre-WWII prints and negs. Sent them to ScanCafe in Hayward, CA. They did a great job of printing and retouching/restoring. Some of those negs were from the 1920s and were Japanese. A hundred years had taken their toll.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

It was to my father, and it still is to my Uncle-in-law who has a purple heart from Iwo Jima. Now I'm not objecting to sarcasm, but history is important and something to learn from, for those that are willing and capable of learning. Just the journey that many families went through during any of the wars is an important story. If you need a reminder, just watch any of the Ken Burns documentories, or his brother's one about Ansel Adams.

So find the best way to get those negatives scanned and preserved. They may or may not be "important", but they certainly won't be if they are lost.

We need negatives, but not necessarily negative opinions.

James Slick Loc: Pittsburgh,PA

My "negative opinion" was a sarcastic comment. I obviously realize the importance of WW2, The jagoff I was responding to does not. I encouraged the OP to preserve the photos by digitizing them. In fact, I'd love to see them. I guess the power to detect sarcasm is lost today.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

I understood that your comment was sarcastic, and I agree with you. Somehow I felt the point needed to be hammered home, since some people do not appear to understand the significance. Apologies to you if my comment wasn't clear enough.

NorCal Bohemian

WOW! JUST WOW! No one is proposing to close or bulldoze Gettysburg! When Osama bin Laden was killed, our military disposed of his remains in an undisclosed place in the ocean - so that there could be no relics to attract followers. When Saddam Hussein was deposed - Iraqi citizens famously pulled down his statue and beat on it. When communism fell across eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union - statues of Lenin, Stalin and Marx were torn down by the victims of their totalitarian brutality. If you want to talk about traitors to this country and human decency - the Confederacy ranks number one! The statues should be put in a museum - with historical documentation and perspective - as a remembrance to never let slavery, and attempted succession from the Union, happen again! (hear that - Cal exit?) While local jurisdictions should have the final word - considering that the atrocity that happened in Charlottesville centered on Confederate statuary - and it's symbolic use by Neo-nazis, KKK and other sub-humans - I say - take em' down!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Absolutely true. I just photograph my old 35mm negatives and slides on a home-built rig, using my LUMIX GH4 and 30mm macro lens. The camera saves 16MP stills. That is enough to resolve the grain...

This is a view of the copier. It's made from junk I found in my workshop. At the top of the frame is the slide holder, made from cardboard from the back of a legal pad, eight memory core magnets from an early 1960s computer, two popsicle sticks, and some double sided tape. Under it is a light source which contains a photo grade CFL lamp in a homemade fixture made from a ceramic sign socket and a 100' film can. The negative holder is the carrier from my Omega B22XL enlarger, circa 1971. The base is made of scrap lumber from a ping-pong table box frame. The camera mount is a pair of criss-crossed flash bracket bases and some random 1/4", “20 tpi screws, nuts, and washers...

The image is an Ilford Pan F neg I made in 1976 for my friend, 12-string guitarist, John Stanfield. I recorded it in raw, processed it in Photoshop. The original was printed for John's first album cover, "Carolina 12-String", on Philo Fretless records. View the photo in download.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YVhw6Z55E — Someone put several tracks on YouTube.

(Download)

John Stanfield — image, ©1976 Bill Burkholder

(Download)

James Slick Loc: Pittsburgh,PA

I had to use sarcasm as many people are willingly ignorant. Trying to convey the real importance would be lost on them.
I was on a math blog (nerdy,I know.) And someone was arguing that we spend too much time studying history in schools, because, unlike math, it had no "real world" value. I countered that we should not teach math (particularly arithmetic) in schools because everyone has a calculator on their phone. The guy thought that was idiocy. But he failed to see that just because in the "real world" I don't go around solving trigonometry problems in my head daily doesn't mean learning math is useless.

srt101fan

That's a pretty impressive rig! If I can't get my new Win 10 computer to play nice with my Minolta film scanner (and it doesn't seem to want to!) I may have to try to build something like that. But first I would need a macro lens. GAS attack coming!?

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

After all that, it would be very interesting if you could share some of the pictures here on UHH. That is, if it is ok. I am sure many of us would be keen to see some of them.

James Slick Loc: Pittsburgh,PA

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Yes, and no. First it is secession not succession. They are slightly different.

Secession from "The Union" or any other regime is an option under a democratic process. How or whether it is done is certainly an issue and worthy of discussion. In the circumstances of the US civil war there was much political positioning and "sabre rattling" prior to any actual act of hostility which some claim was instigated by the confederacy preventing a supply vessel reaching Fort Sumter, others that it was the actual firing upon Fort Sumter by General P.G.T. Beauregard's forces.

Let's not confuse this by disregarding the rights of democratic processes however misguided they may be. Brexit appears to be a dumb move by the UK, but it was the result of a democratic process. Should California be allowed to secede if its population wants to? Sure, it may not be a smart thing to do, but it should be allowed under a democratic process. Should the civilized parts of the US be allowed to secede from Texas? Sure if enough people wish to. What is to be done about Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia? It is all very complicated.

However, we do not need symbols or activities that spread hatred, destruction and riots. Those symbols do not need to be destroyed, they are part of our history, but removing them to other locations to defuse current hostile acts, misuse or vandalism from any faction is a good idea.

As for WWII negatives, let's have the content preserved, regardless of photographic quality. They are part of the record of humanity. Even just one may be historically significant, and others may be significant to specific people.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Peter, thanks for a reasoned opinion on this issue.

There are many who want to destroy all evidence of the confederacy, and many who wish to flaunt it, yelling, "The South shall rise again!" Those are fantasies, surely, but many just want to preserve their heritage, while many others just want to erase a sore spot.

I agree, putting the statues and monuments in a museum is smart. Greensboro just renamed a school and a park to forget the original namesake's dedication to slavery. But his story remains in the local history.

Violence and extremism of all kinds are unnecessary and only lead to conflict.

It's been weird, living in the Carolinas most of my life, but having Midwestern parents. I have learned a good bit of history as presented by Northerners and a good bit of history as presented by Southerners. Each points to quite different reasons for that war, with quite different outcomes. I tend to see both sides... to a point.

Yes, it was most important as the war to end forced slavery, but it was also a war of protest against Northern economic oppression of Southern progress. In the mid-19th century, most of the South had an agrarian economy. In NC, many grew tobacco, cotton, peanuts, rice, and other crops. Most of the crops and other raw materials were shipped North to manufacturers, converted to finished goods, and sold all over. But there were some onerous taxes involved, and there was social and economic suppression of information and technology that would have allowed the advancement of the Southern economy to include manufacturing. Southerners knew that if they lost the almost free labor of slaves, their economy would be brought to the brink of ruin, at least for a time. The war proved that true, although most *Americans* would agree the abolition of slavery was worth it.

It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that the economy of the South began to include a lot more manufacturing. The pace of change accelerated slowly at first, and rapidly after air conditioning became widely available in the 1950s. "Rust belt" companies gradually located plants in the rural and suburban South, mostly to get away from union labor and exploit cheap water, power, natural gas, and wood. The rise of educational institutions had much to do with it, as did urbanization and urban migration in some areas.

Of course, after NAFTA, companies escaped the South for the Far East and South America... Ah, the law of unintended consequences is always hard at work!

The aristocratic sons and daughters of the Confederacy still bear grudges over the loss of their economic status "way back when", and the subsequent "economic punishment" they endured for several decades after the war. The resentment is different among upper, middle, and lower (white) classes, too. Poor whites tend to have a completely different set of resentments (labor competition among the races) from the learned upper class. And the middle class tends to be irrationally schizoid about their history. They, too, resented the introduction of another (paid) labor pool after the Civil War, but no longer want to perform the menial labor in fields and mills that immigrants and foreign workers will do willingly. They'll flip burgers or do data entry, but won't scrub floors or pick crops, and they won't lower their living standards to compete with foreign workers. It's taken several generations for education to become a priority as a ticket to success here. In the North, that ticket was identified rather clearly during the depression, as my parents were always quick to point out.

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times. "The sins of the forefathers are passed down for seven generations." Well, 7 generations after the war was the year 2005... So we ought to see some progress by now. We do, but pockets of cancerous, racist, narcissistic nostalgia remain.

So it's complicated... Cities like Charlotte, NC, where I lived for 35 years, are huge melting pots of people from all over the USA and the world, in addition to their small contingents of local descendants. So they tend to be pretty liberal and tolerant, by comparison with smaller towns. That liberalism is another source of conflict. NC is a purple state, with the main urban markets predominantly liberal, and most of the rural areas quite conservative.

So when I see news like we saw last week, I cringe and wonder what will pop up next --- and where?