The Unending Civil War: America is a nation in love with its myths. And this is especially true when it comes to the way Americans remember, celebrate and revere the Civil War, a bloody and transformative contest that has been called the “War Between the States,” the “Recent Unpleasantness,” the “War of Northern Aggression” and the more historically accurate “War of the Rebellion.” As a young boy in the 1960s, during the centennial of the war, I remember how myths often trumped truth in the public expression of this national celebration. At the very moment when a movement for civil rights was changing America and a cold war was changing the world, many Americans looked back with nostalgia for a simpler, less complex time when heroic White men fought honorably, found a binding peace and laid the foundation for America’s rise to global super power. The hundreds of books, movies, television shows, board games and blue and gray toy soldiers that were created during the centennial all presented an incomplete picture that obscured as much as it illuminated America’s past. Rarely, for example, was the issue of race raised except to confirm that “Lincoln freed the slaves.”
