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* we were taught in school that when they shot up Ft. Sumter; it was the start of the War Between The States. But that's not even close! What started the Civil was was when Lincoln sent 90,000 Union regulars into Northern Virginia.

gary

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My wife is a Civil War history buff and has checked her sources (though she probably didn't need to). Anything you have heard about Lincoln sending 90,000 Federal troops into Northern Virginia BEFORE the war started is a myth. Number one there was no such force at that time, and it was AFTER the firing on Ft. Sumter that Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to be called up. Sorry but you have been a victim of the myth thing.

Jim

PS: Please keep this interesting topic civil or it will be locked. ~ Thanks.

PPS: Perhaps some of you need to just check your facts a bit more (proving the point of this topic). For example if you lookup the B1 program on Wikipedia you get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-1_Lancer, which btw points out that the program was already underway during Nixon's term. Here's the interesting historical bit though....

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The program remained highly controversial. In particular, Senator William Proxmire continually derided it in public, arguing it was an outlandishly expensive dinosaur. During the 1976 federal election campaign, Jimmy Carter made it one of the Democratic Party's platforms, saying "The B-1 bomber is an example of a proposed system which should not be funded and would be wasteful of taxpayers' dollars."

Another cancellation
When Carter took office in 1977 he ordered a review of the entire program. By this point the projected cost of the program had risen to over $100 million per aircraft, although this was lifetime cost over twenty years. He was informed of the relatively new work on stealth aircraft that had started in 1975, and decided that this was a far better avenue of approach than the B-1. Pentagon officials also stated that the ALCM launched from the existing B-52 fleet would give the USAF equal capability of penetrating Soviet airspace. With a 1500 mile range, the ALCM could be launched well outside the range of any Soviet defenses, and penetrate at low altitude just like a bomber, but in much greater numbers. A program to improve the B-52 and develop and deploy the ALCM would cost perhaps 20% of the price to deploy the planned 244 B-1A's.

On 30 June 1977 Carter announced that the B-1A would be canceled, in favor of ICBMs, SLBMs, and a fleet of modernized B-52s armed with ALCMs.[5] Carter called it "one of the most difficult decisions that I've made since I've been in office." No mention of the stealth work was made public, the program being top secret, but today it is known that he started the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) project in early 1978, which eventually led to the B-2 Spirit.

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Here's one I'm surprised hasn't come up: The 1937 purge of the Soviet Army deprived it of all its good officers on ideological grounds and caused it to perform so badly in 1941.

Actually, the purge was to get rid of a lot of incompetent officers, which was a real problem in the Soviet Army of the time, and that was caused by overexpansion of the military and poor development and training. It was that which was really responsible for the poor performance of 1941. Also, bad military officers were simply discharged from the military and expelled from the Communist Party (membership a requirement for officers), rather than receiving harsher punishments.

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Here's one I'm surprised hasn't come up: The 1937 purge of the Soviet Army deprived it of all its good officers on ideological grounds and caused it to perform so badly in 1941.

Actually, the purge was to get rid of a lot of incompetent officers, which was a real problem in the Soviet Army of the time, and that was caused by overexpansion of the military and poor development and training. It was that which was really responsible for the poor performance of 1941. Also, bad military officers were simply discharged from the military and expelled from the Communist Party (membership a requirement for officers), rather than receiving harsher punishments.

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Is this really true?

PS: Please keep this interesting topic civil or it will be locked. ~ Thanks.

Listen to better talk radio

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Here's one I'm surprised hasn't come up: The 1937 purge of the Soviet Army deprived it of all its good officers on ideological grounds and caused it to perform so badly in 1941.

Actually, the purge was to get rid of a lot of incompetent officers, which was a real problem in the Soviet Army of the time, and that was caused by overexpansion of the military and poor development and training. It was that which was really responsible for the poor performance of 1941. Also, bad military officers were simply discharged from the military and expelled from the Communist Party (membership a requirement for officers), rather than receiving harsher punishments.

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Is this really true?

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Put me down as another doubter, Stalin's purge was a result of his tremendous paranoia and its victims spanned the the spectrum of militarily gifted (Rokossovsky) to the less so (Tukhachevsky - and there's another debate on his abilities or otherwise...). The fact that buffoons like Budenny and, worse, Kulik came through unscathed undermines any argument about it being simply a house clearing.

David

March 6 the new Confederate Executive, Jefferson Davis, called for a 100,000-man volunteer force to serve for twelve months.

The creation of a rival War Department south of the 35th parallel on February 21 shattered the composition of the Regular Army and disrupted its activities, particularly in Texas, where Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs surrendered his entire command. With an actual strength of 1,080 officers and 14,926 enlisted men on June 30, 1860, the Regular Army was based on 5-year enlistments. Recruited heavily from men of foreign birth, the United States Army consisted of 10 regiments of infantry, 4 of artillery, 2 of cavalry, 2 of dragoons, and 1 of mounted riflemen.. It was not a unified striking force. The Regular Army was deployed within seven departments, six of them west of the Mississippi. Of 198 line companies, 183 were scattered in 79 isolated posts in the territories. The remaining 15 were in garrisons along the Canadian border and on the Atlantic coast.

Slavery would have died out if there were no Civil War. Economic and technological evolution was already making it obsolescent. Several nations in South America still had slavery years after it was abolished in the United States, and they abolished slavery of their own accord.

In reality, while Hearst did rush to judgement in his newspapers, the charges against Arbuckle were definitely not trumped up. According to court papers, the victim was a young actress Arbuckle had been unsuccessfully pursuing for a long time, though she did come to a party he was hosting at a hotel room where a heavy amount of alcohol (then illegal, as Prohibition had been enacted) was served. During the party, the victim was dancing with Arbuckle, who led her into the bedroom, winked at the others, and said, "Now's my chance." The door was locked and there was a lot of noise and screaming from behind the door, which was opened with an irritated Arbuckle storming out, and the victim was screaming that Arbuckle had harmed her. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital where she died of a badly ruptured vagina. A former wife of Arbuckle's testified he was sexually impotent since 1917, and it took two mistrials before he was found not guilty in a third trial, though the judge told the jury essentially that Arbuckle was innocent. By that time, though, nobody believed Arbuckle was genuinely innocent, and his name became mud in Hollywood.

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Slavery would have died out if there were no Civil War. Economic and technological evolution was already making it obsolescent. Several nations in South America still had slavery years after it was abolished in the United States, and they abolished slavery of their own accord.

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That may (or may not) perhaps be true, but obviously at the time such an extinction of the institution could not be foreseen. The Confederacy held dear to it during that era, as it was an integral part of the Plantation economy in the primarily agrarian South. Interestingly, the United States, for all of it's talk of liberty and freedom and "unalienable rights", was the last industrialized nation to rid itself of the dreaded institution.

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Slavery would have died out if there were no Civil War. Economic and technological evolution was already making it obsolescent. Several nations in South America still had slavery years after it was abolished in the United States, and they abolished slavery of their own accord.

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That may (or may not) perhaps be true, but obviously at the time such an extinction of the institution could not be foreseen. The Confederacy held dear to it during that era, as it was an integral part of the Plantation economy in the primarily agrarian South. Interestingly, the United States, for all of it's talk of liberty and freedom and "unalienable rights", was the last industrialized nation to rid itself of the dreaded institution.

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I take it you never heard of the nation of Brazil (abolished slavery in 1888). And you're also wrong that nobody expected slavery to be abolished. It was already expected to die out anyway, from the time of the American Revolution, which is why the importation of new slaves into the United States was banned then.

Slavery would have died out if there were no Civil War. Economic and technological evolution was already making it obsolescent. Several nations in South America still had slavery years after it was abolished in the United States, and they abolished slavery of their own accord.

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Slavery would have died out if there were no Civil War. Economic and technological evolution was already making it obsolescent. Several nations in South America still had slavery years after it was abolished in the United States, and they abolished slavery of their own accord.

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That may (or may not) perhaps be true, but obviously at the time such an extinction of the institution could not be foreseen. The Confederacy held dear to it during that era, as it was an integral part of the Plantation economy in the primarily agrarian South. Interestingly, the United States, for all of it's talk of liberty and freedom and "unalienable rights", was the last industrialized nation to rid itself of the dreaded institution.

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I take it you never heard of the nation of Brazil (abolished slavery in 1888). And you're also wrong that nobody expected slavery to be abolished. It was already expected to die out anyway, from the time of the American Revolution, which is why the importation of new slaves into the United States was banned then.

Another interesting fact about slavery in the South, as it pertains to the ridiculous institution of the Electoral College--the number of Electoral Votes that each state had was calculated based upon not only the voting white Euro-American population (the landowning male population, that is), but also on the number of slaves owned....although the slaves themselves could not vote.

.... None of this would have happened without the help of our allies and without Ronald Reagan.

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.... None of this would have happened without the help of our allies and without Ronald Reagan.

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Inasmuch as I liked Reagan (wish he was in charge now, Bin Ladens head would be on a pike in Times Square already), you cant forget that he cut spending so severely for NASA and the space program back so heavily, that Voyager was actually put together from pieces of junked space craft, and funds straight out of the pocket of researchers.

I Everyone is saying that the War WAS FOUGHT because of slavery or not. The root causes as to why the war was fought were economics /states rights/slavery. The War was fought to "Preserve the Union". MOst of the Southerners felt that their land was being invaded as proabbaly 90 % of the War was fought on their turf and they wre defending their homes. Maybe I am taking a southern mentality on this, but I know that is how I would have felt back then.

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I Everyone is saying that the War WAS FOUGHT because of slavery or not. The root causes as to why the war was fought were economics /states rights/slavery. The War was fought to "Preserve the Union". MOst of the Southerners felt that their land was being invaded as proabbaly 90 % of the War was fought on their turf and they wre defending their homes. Maybe I am taking a southern mentality on this, but I know that is how I would have felt back then.

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With respect, I think you are conflating two different issues: why the soldiers felt they were fighting is different from why their governments went to war. I don't believe the average joe in the confederate army was fighting to preserve slavery - but there is simply no question that that is what the confederacy was about. The 'states' rights' theory is a myth perpetuated by those very southern politicians working so hard to preserve salvery and then deny what they were doing. Same thing politcians do today - they don't always acknowedge their real motives.