I need help with editorial...for history?

Question

"write an editorial about the civil war from the point of view of a union supporter or a confederate supporter. explain why the war must be fought and what is at stake. remember that an editorial is an opinion piece -- you write what you feel."

ok and i have no clue what to write, can you please help??

please please please

write it in your own words..please

Answer 1

Editorial:

By Editorial Board

It is difficult not to love Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute (www.wikipedia.org). With 1,674,086 articles in English alone, it provides anyone with Internet access the ability to get fast, free information on anything from the New Orleans Mint (operational until 1909), to the biography of Weird Al Yankovic (he started accordion lessons at age seven).

In February, the Department of History at Middlebury College forbade students from citing Wikipedia as a source in history papers and tests, also giving notice that students would not be given any breaks for mistaken knowledge they derived from the site.

The department’s decision received national attention, including a February 21 article in The New York Times, and much of the response has been negative. One op-ed printed in the Middlebury Campus, the school newspaper, likened the move to “censorship” and condemned the professors who advocated the ban.

We have a hard time understanding what all of the fuss is about. Middlebury’s new rule is hardly censorship. Students are not prohibited from viewing, discussing or disseminating anything from Wikipedia. Rather, history students have simply been officially told what should already be obvious: Wikipedia, however useful, is not something that should be cited in a serious academic context, and if it is used, it could reflect poorly on students’ work.

Most university-level students should be able to discern between Wikipedia and more reliable online sources like government databases and online periodicals. To be fair, some of Wikipedia’s entries are specific enough to be extremely valuable in studying or researching, but others are shallow, short, and occasionally completely inaccurate. There are many Web sites that can provide credible resources, but Wikipedia is not one of them, nor does it purport to be. Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, told The Times that he does not even consider Middlebury’s action “a negative thing.”

Naturally, because it is a user-generated Web site, the articles are not always perfect, and should not be relied on as much as actual class materials. Wikipedia has even introduced a citation function where contributors can direct readers to other more well-established sources.

Yet even as we point out that college students ought to know better than to rely completely on Wikipedia, Middlebury’s ban seems a bit overzealous. Students are also supposed to use proper grammar and spelling in assignments, but rather than having an official policy against poor writing, most schools simply tell students what the standards are ahead of time.

It is the role of teachers to advise students what is acceptable; for some assignments it is conceivable that referencing Wikipedia as an example, rather than an authoritative source, might be useful. Instead of totally banning Wikipedia as an information source departmentally, history professors at Middlebury should have stressed or continued to stress that using it could hurt an individual’s performance in the class. Much like spelling and grammar, if students already know what is expected in terms of citations, any deviation from expectations will make grading easier for professors.

There was a point in time where all Internet sources were suspect for most academic uses. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. Research has certainly become easier and more accessible with online help, but some sites, like some books, are better than others. We still love Wikipedia and admit that it can be great for a quick definition or fact, but we won’t be citing it in any papers anytime soon.

A.Arun prakash

Answer 2

I grew up in North Carolina, which was one of the states of the "upper south", which did not secede until after Fort Sumter was attacked and Lincoln called for volunteers to crush the "rebellion", with a specific number requested from every state which had not seceded, including North Carolina.  Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas also did not secede until after Fort Sumter, and Maryland would have except Lincoln imprisoned most of the state's legislators.  Kentucky and Missouri tried to secede but were thwarted by the large number of Unionists in them.  Delaware, a slave state, did not try after Maryland's example.  The original seven deep south states which had seceded before Fort Sumter are difficult to understand, but seem to have been motivated by the part of Lincoln's election platform which called for not allowing the extension of slavery into the states formed from the territory won from Mexico in the Mexican War.  The whole issue had been increasingly bitter and divisive in the 1850s, and the political leadership in the deep south states was already primed for action.  North Carolina was in a real bind.  It has no natural harbors worth mentioning, and none which were important immigration ports.  Everybody in NC had ancestors who came in from Virginia or South Carolina, and many still had family there.   South Carolina seceded five months before NC, and Virginia seceded a month before North Carolina, and with Virginia out of the Union, NC was surrounded.  The majority of NC's citizens were not slave holders, but the eastern part of the state had some large plantation owners, and most of the political power.  If I were to try to justify secession to newspaper readers in May 1861, it might go like the following:

In 1788 when we agreed to try a new government under the Constitution, our consent was required before the Constitution took effect.  Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the Union created by the Constitution is to be perpetual, and nowhere does it say that a state is prohibited from withdrawing from the Union.  If it did hold those propositions, we would never have consented to it.  Now we are told by the Federal Government that it IS perpetual, and that we are no longer free to leave it, if it is unsatisfactory to us.  We are told we must assist the Federal government in punishing our friends and relatives in our neighboring state with fire and sword, or suffer such a fate ourselves.

The northern states have for generations combined against those in the south to force economic slavery upon us.  They have used the power of the Federal government to interfere with our trade with foreign nations, and have against our will placed taxes and tariffs on the goods which we must have and can obtain only by importation, so as to make the goods we prefer more expensive than their own poor and inferior goods, which they hope to force us to buy through these unjust taxes.

The northern states have continually sought to interfere with our peculiar institution, to incite bloody revolts among our African slaves, as we saw in Virginia when Nat Turner led his murderous rampage.  They have hoped to cause a repetition of the bloodbath we saw in Haiti, and have sent among us fiends who encourage these vile acts, such as the infamous John Brown.  When caught and justly punished these brutes have been hailed as heroes at the north.

Nowhere in the north was war with Mexico supported,   It was declared by southerners, fought and won by southerners, and the fruits of victory secured by southerners.  Now we are told by the current President that we cannot have our share of the proceeds of this amazing victory, that we shall not be permitted to carry our property into these new territories.

The Federal government has these months past wrongfully persisted in maintaining military posts in the departed states, such as Fort Pickens in Pensacola, and Fort Sumter in Charleston, and have occupied these posts with soldiers bent on forcing our obedience to their wicked policies.  Now they have levied upon us for troops, to aid them in their designs, and to bring ruin to our neighbors and families.

The time has come for us as a people to go our own way.  Sorrowfully and with a heavy heart must we confront the fact that what was a useful political combination for us seventy years ago is no longer in our best interest.

Thats the editorial.  Id add that Im glad the south lost and I think it would have been a bad thing for the US to have broken up, into two or more pieces.  Id have a hard time giving you a northern editorial though, because its hard to argue with the constitutional point that the union was not thought to be perpetual nor indivisible when it was made under the constitution.  Lincoln was actually the real revolutionary, in that he wanted to change the deal, and did so successfully.  Nobody's tried getting out of it since.

The south tried to leave the union at least in part to try to protect slavery, but the north did not include ending slavery in their initial reasons for the war.  It was over a year before the Emancipation Proclamation.  Grant in his memoirs tried to justify making the south stay in the union involuntarily with a strange theory that, while the original thirteen states entered into a voluntary agreement to adopt the Constitution, once MORE states were admitted, none of the original thirteen could get out, which doesnt really hold water.  There isnt really a good northern legal argument to be made that justifies making states remain in the union which want to go.