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Talk:Mary Simms Oliphant

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Simms Oliphant as a revisionist whitewasher of history

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According to Isaac Bailey's opinion piece on the Confederate Flag,

"For about 6 decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s, the S.C. history book used in our public schools was written by a woman named Mary C. Simms Oliphant - the daughter of a Confederate general.

"In the book, she wrote about happy slaves, and with sympathy for the KKK, and little to nothing about iconic black South Carolinians such as Denmark Vesey."

Reading the Wikipedia entry on Ms. Simms Oliphant, one would never know the damage that she caused to the minds of children "educated" by her book in South Carolina schools. This Wikipedia article, if not biased, is certainly incomplete. Criticisms of Ms. Simms Oliphant's pro-Confederate sympathies and of her failure to record history in an objective and just manner need to be included. 67.197.139.156 (talk) 16:52, 22 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia everyone can edit, which means you too can include additional information; but "when available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources." Opinion pieces in the media are not usually the best place to look. For starters on this editorial, there was a Confederate general named James P. Simms, but he was from Georgia and, so far as I know, no relation to Mary Simms Oliphant.--John Foxe (talk) 21:07, 22 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]