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