Inappropriate Comments

I love reading old books.  One of the reasons I love it is because the writing is as interesting as the story being told.  It reveals the perceptions, biases, and perspectives of the author and the time period as much as the information being conveyed.  For example, I have a history book of WWI written in 1919.  It has a vastly different perspective and uses starkly different language than one written in 1998. 

I’m currently reading the Memoirs of Robert E. Lee.  Of course, Marse Robert never wrote his memoirs, so it’s a bit of a misleading title.  In fact, this is written by General A. L. Long, Lee’s longtime secretary and friend.  Long wrote the memoir with the input of many of Lee’s contemporaries and after Long went blind.  The original publishing date was 1887. 

On page 61, in reference to the conclusion of the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Long writes:

The terms on which the peace was granted, as is well known, were highly advantageous to the United States, and perhaps in no just sense disadvantageous to Mexico, for the provinces which were ceded to the United States, though they have been raised to such a high value by Anglo-Saxon enterprise and energy, were almost worthless in the hands of the supine Mexicans.

(Do you see where I get my love of commas?)  Agree with it or not, a sentence like that, would not be written in a modern history book.  Old books are like two treasures in one.