Let me guess, you're reading Wilkerson?

Kelman, as in the Dutch Cookie. In theory, I'm writing a review. In practice, my reaction to almost any interesting non-fiction is "Neat. I didn't know any of that stuff," which is hard to stretch out into an evaluation of the book.

interesting non-fiction

Well but that's 90% of the non-fiction writer's challenge, isn't it?

Here's a TV segment from a couple of years back about a Georgia county that has not changed their monument which mentions a neighboring county which had only recently done so. Several different views are presented.

I'm kind of curious -- would everyone else have figured it out immediately? It seems obvious now, but it really took me a while thinking hard about what it could possibly be -- I finally got there by "Women? Are those women's names? No... oh."

I wouldn't; I was thinking "Army and Navy? But then why change the monument? Maybe combat and non-combat?"

I didn't, but I didn't spend much time thinking it over.

5: yes. Immediately.

5: I figured it out pretty quick in the context of the post (before the reveal, I mean). Would I have done so in your position of actually being there? Maybe! Who knows.

Being there was a little garden-pathy in that I noticed and started wondering about the separate lists before I noticed the erasure, so I started searching for explanations that didn't have anything to do with revisionism -- I was grasping vaguely at "National Guard? Reserves? Merchant Marine?"

Was this in Raleigh?

Greenville.

If I'd been in Raleigh, I would have checked in to see if you were around -- that's roughly your part of the state, right?

Next county over, yes. I lived in Greenville from 2nd to 4th grade.

would have known right away :-(

shit, I'm surprised those guys got on the damn monument in the first place.

The problem is, making a whole new slab with aunified list is expensive. It'll have to wait till the reparations are flowing.

16: I think that's sort of the difference between North Carolina and South Carolina.

Reminds me of this.

16 was my reaction as well. This is another data point for refuting that stupid "Northern racism is just as bad as Southern racism" argument.

5

I'm kind of curious -- would everyone else have figured it out immediately? ...

I think I would have. As with an old rest area with two men's rooms and two women's rooms. Of course in the later case I am not absolutely sure that is the explanation.

19: On that one, I can't figure out the missing word.

Red is too short. Savage?

Savage would be my guess as well.

'Savage' would fit. It obviously had to be a negative adjective, I was just getting stuck on anything that'd be formal enough to carve into a monument.

I would also guess "savage."

"Digger" Indians is probably the most offensive term (though I believe without total certainty that term was still being used in grade school California history in the LAUSD when I was a child, it was certainly around in some book I read as a kid), but probably wouldn't be used to emphasize the ferocity of the enemy against which our brave genocidal heroes fought.

You can sort of see the top of the S, I think.

26.2: I have never heard of this term?

http://www.nanations.com/digger/

They prefer "Mound builder".

Interesting that the plaque in the adjacent photo in that stream appears to be suggesting that calling people "savage" and "rebel" are equivalent in derogatory value and seems to suggest that they should equally be abandoned. Political subtext much?

The word was "savage." As chris y noted, I also put up a picture of the accompanying semi-apologetic plaque. I also found the grouping of "savage" and "rebel" on that plaque interesting; it's perhaps noteworthy that while "savage" was removed from the memorial, "rebel" was not similarly removed from the Civil War part (not pictured).

I suspect the "rebel" thing has to do with all the Texan tourists Santa Fe gets these days.

Also, "digger" is a specifically California term, closely associated with that state's exceptionally atrocious treatment of its Indians even by the standards of nineteenth-century America (which is really saying something).

I think I have commented here before about the historical marker near my childhood home that referred to "savages". It never even struck me as noteworthy before Fleur pointed it out to me. It has since been replaced by a more politically correct inscription.

I wonder whether the word "savage" has always carried the connotation of "heinous" and "wicked" that it carries today. The French sauvage is a morally neutral word, comparable to "wild" in the sense of "untamed". Could English speakers of past centuries have thought of the word "savage" in the same way - an antonym to civilized, nothing more? Of course, that meaning would still have been mildly pejorative, but not to the same degree. This is evidence-free conjecture; maybe someone more knowledgeable can weigh in.

In any event, I would imagine that the contemporary sense of the word was well established by the time those memorials were erected.

35. 'Savagery' was the first of Lewis Morgan's (and by extension Engels') stages of cultural development, succeeded by barbarism and civilisation. I don't think Morgan attached any particularly pejorative sense to the concept; he defined it by technology. Of course he believed in the superiority of European civilisation: he was born in 1818, but that's a different question.

The online etymology dictionary has:

savage (adj.)
c.1300, "wild, undomesticated, untamed" (of animals and places), from Old French sauvage, salvage "wild, savage, untamed," from Late Latin salvaticus, alteration of silvaticus "wild," literally "of the woods," from silva "forest, grove" (see sylvan). Of persons, the meaning "reckless, ungovernable" is attested from c.1400, earlier in sense "indomitable, valiant" (c.1300). Implications of ferocity are attested from 1570s, earlier of animals (c.1400).

savage (n.)
"wild person," 1580s, from savage (adj.).

That doesn't speak directly to its subsequent connotations, however.

Could English speakers of past centuries have thought of the word "savage" in the same way - an antonym to civilized, nothing more? Of course, that meaning would still have been mildly pejorative

I don't have anything to back this up, but my intuition is that to call a person the opposite of civilized would have been more than mildly pejorative in centuries past -- while the term might not have carried connotations of wickedness, it meant that the person described was in some way subhuman.