As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve begun to read Michael Korda’s 2015 biography of Robert E. Lee. It’s to my shame that I have reached my 50th year knowing very little about the life and character of Lee. I don’t know about other Southern readers, but the idea that we Southerners — white ones, anyway — are steeped in Civil War history is simply not true. Or at least it wasn’t true in my experience. It’s wrong to generalize from one’s particular experience, of course, but insofar as what happened to me is a reliable guide to education in the rest of the South, the problem is not that we were indoctrinated with a romanticized view of Southern history. The problem is that so many of us were given little to no history at all.
It’s strange, actually. One of my cousins told me about visiting our grandmother during his 1950s childhood, and listening to her and the old folks sitting on the front porch talking about the War — the Civil War, not World War II. Her grandfather had been a Confederate soldier, so the War was close to her lived experience. Besides, time and culture moved a lot slower then, certainly in rural Louisiana. It must not have felt so far away, the War.
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