So Yeah

Civil War class sucks.

What's supposedly an upper-division ooh ooh ooooooh university level course is two hours and forty minutes a week of copying down powerpoint notes while the instructor either tells us about immigration and how people in North Dakota have no opinion today on immigration that isn't ignorant. And every other issue is somehow related politically to the abortion issue today. The Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s is really the party that Bush should be in. But then when he told us about the competition for jobs that the natives had against immigrants, he explained my question about the influence of union violence and forcing wages to be raised by...

oh wait. I didn't ask that 'cause I knew it'd have been pointless. I'll just find out on my own later.

Boring. He showed us a chart that showed that there were more banks in the North than the South by 1860. Not so much just for our information, but so as to say that the South was ignorant economically because it doesn't tkae that much complication to run a cotton plantation with a thousand slaves. "Not that the south was ignorant...although they were hardy har har"
The chart gave me a lot more other questions, but I didn't want to ask 'cause it wasn't really about the Civil War so much as I guess an extension of the bank situation in itself. What kind of banks were these? Private? State, federal? What was the nature of the medium of exchange by then? I assume specie was almost completely out the window again; everyone just kept winking and nodding on the way out of the banks like they did in 1819? How did the influx of gold from California in the 50s change that? Or did the gold even get that far back east?

Meh. The Medieval Europe classes are cooler and more importantly right now, gonna take up more of my time anyway with the 10-page stereo manuals I'll need to do.