By Garland Tucker The violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 have fueled a deep-seated leftist desire to re-write American history. Demands to topple statues, remove portraits, rename buildings, and repudiate founders—all in an effort to cleanse any objectionable reality from our history—have reached a fever pitch. The parallel to George Orwell’s 1984 is unmistakable. Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.” College campuses, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, Williams, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, etc., have become battlefields. Consider recent events at my college alma mater, Washington & Lee University. Founded in 1749, W&L has a history that is longer than most American colleges and as rich as any. Established as Augusta Academy on what was then the western frontier of colonial America, the school was elevated from obscurity in 1796 by a gift from General George Washington. The name was promptly changed to Washington College and it survived as a provincial, liberal arts college until the outbreak of the Civil War. With the war-torn devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, Washington College was threatened with imminent extinction in 1865. Shortly after Appomattox, in an inspired…
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