Southerners have always been great story tellers...
hence their version--false or true-- had enough flare
to become the best seller.

--
Melinda C. P. Skinner
Richmond, VA


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Brent Tarter <[log in to unmask]>
> Kevin Berland wrote yesterday, 
> 
> "From the point of view of simple historiographical theory (and from the
> point of view of the familiar proverb) the victors write the histories.
> To claim that many histories of the civil war suffer from a one-sided
> point of view is neither new nor radical.  It's simply true."
> 
> I hate to disagree with my friend Kevin, but a good argument can be made
> (and I have hinted at it, myself, before) that even though the
> Confederacy lost the Civil War on the battlefield, the South can be said
> to have won the history.
> 
> The influence of Southern and pro-Southern interpretations in the
> post-Civil War histories may be in some part responsible for the fact
> that we are still intensely debating whether secession was legal or
> right (which are not the same thing), whether the South or the North
> bore the larger share of responsibility for the first fighting, whether
> or to what extent the institution of slavery was a cause of the war,
> what the aims of the South and the North were and whether or why they
> changed, why Southern leaders made different assertions about their
> motivations after 1865 than they did in 1861, and so forth and so on.
> Where else in the world, I beg to ask, have the leaders of an
> unsuccessful rebellion against a government been so lionized as in the
> American South?
> 
> If the winners had won the literature as well as the last battles,
> perhaps a national consensus would have developed that regarded the
> Southern claims and objectives as invalidated by the verdict of the
> contending armies.
> 
> $0.02 U.S. currency from
> 
> Brent Tarter
> The Library of Virginia
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> Visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us