The Volokh Conspiracy
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"Rightfully reversing decades of secessionist rehabilitation"
Max Boot (Commentary) has a piece on this, and it strikes me as quite right. An excerpt:
[T]here is a big distinction to be made between remembering the past—something that, as a historian, I'm all in favor of—and honoring those who did bad things in the past. Remembrance does not require public displays of the Confederate flag, nor streets with names such as Jefferson Davis Highway—a road that always rankles me to drive down in Northern Virginia. Such gestures are designed to honor leaders of the Confederacy, who were responsible for the costliest war in American history—men who were traitors to this country, inveterate racists, and champions of slavery….
This is not "rewriting" history; it's getting history right. The rewriting was done by Lost Cause mythologists who created pro-Confederate propaganda (such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind) to convince their countrymen that the South was actually in the right even as it imposed slavery and then segregation….
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