American History Hit - Lessons from the Civil War

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

Gone with the Wind, released in 1939, is the highest-grossing film of all time. Based on Margaret Mitchell's novel published a few years earlier, it is a story of romance set against the backdrop of the civil war and reconstruction era. But, as Sarah Churchwell tells Don, it whitewashes the horrors of slavery, while condemning those who abolished it. And it is not alone. This is something that has happened in popular culture and the media since the civil war and continues today.Produced by Benjie Guy. Assistant producer Sophie Gee. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's the evening of February 29th, 1940 in Los Angeles. Hattie McDaniel, celebrated actress comedian and singer-songwriter,

becomes the first African-American to win an Oscar, her best actress in a supporting role in Gone with the Wind. The epic David O'Souselznik film based on Margaret Mitchell's best-selling novel published four years earlier. It is a landmark moment in American cultural history, given that, at the time, racial segregation is still rampant across the United States. But sadly, at tonight's glamorous ceremony staged at the Coconut Grove Nightclub, Hattie McDaniel is seated apart from her castmates and their fellow white attendees,

off to the side of the room, because the ambassador hotel where the nightclub is located follows a strict segregationist policy. Indeed, months before, when the movie was premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, McDaniel and other African-American cast members from the film weren't even invited. Gone with the Wind was conceived as an allegorical, tale, characterizing the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather successfully back in the day, in terms of the Lost Cause South resolved like Scarlett O'Hara herself to rise again. But of course, it whitewashed the agonizing truths of enslavement and exploitation. The book still lists among the most popular and profitable ever published.

Still sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year. The film, well, it's the highest grossing movie of all time. Clearly, this was a tale more than mere entertainment, containing ideas and themes that had resonated through American culture for centuries. And uncomfortably, for many Americans today, it still does. Hi, I'm Don Wildman. Welcome to American History Hit. Today's episode is another one recorded in London. This time, though, with historian Sarah Churchwell, an author who's written a very interesting book on the lessons from the Civil War, specifically a book about Gone with the Wind. So I'm here with Sarah Churchwell, sitting at a desk in the middle of the University of London,

two Americans sitting down in the middle of one of the classiest areas of town. Who would have expected it? You are a cultural historian who teaches here at the University of London. And the book that I'm interested in is The Wrath to Come, which is Just Out. Just Out. Yeah, just out. And its subtitle is Gone with the Wind and the lies America tells. Lies that America tells what?

I know, right? What are the good guys? Didn't you know? Well, it's an interesting thing. because all nations are, you know, built on a certain amount of their own mythology. But America really goes for it in many departments. The work you're talking about is something that touched so many Americans in several generations, which is the novel Gone with the Wind.

I remember when my parents took me to the re-release in 1968 or something like that. I was a little kid sitting in the hometown theater watching this massive epic because it was their history lesson to me of what the Civil War really was. That was the kind of attitude towards it. but it was so rife with all kinds of subplots that are now being excavated and discussed. And fortunately, you've published a book about the very subject. Tell me what drew you to this. Well, as you say, it was a novel and a film that many of us grew up with.

And like you, I also remember first encountering it as a child. And I loved it. I was obsessed with it. I wanted hoops skirts and I identified with Scarlett O'Hara. But also, as you rightly say, we were encouraged to take it seriously as a piece of history as something that, yes, it was a fictional love story. But it was set against, we were told, a kind of accurate depiction of Civil War history and reconstruction. And so imaginary people living out against the epic truths of American historical realities.

And of course, as you rightly say, that whole idea is itself a profound mythology. And indeed, I'm arguing, and I'm not the first to say, a very pernicious mythology that has done a lot of damage in my view to American cultural and really political life now. So I really wanted to come out it as someone who'd grown up loving it, but had come to really re-examine that position. And then with recent political events, really since the rise of Trump, it kept coming into the news. It just kept coming up. And in lots of different ways, it was like this touchstone that the country kept coming back to. His tweets. So Trump at a rally when Parasite became the first South Korean film to win best picture, Trump says, why can't movies like Gone with the Wind Win Best Picture anymore, right? So there were things like that. There was the fact that

During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, HBO Max decided to pause streaming, gone with the wind, to re-contextualize it with some of the facts around its inaccuracies. And that prompted a whole storm around censorship, although they made clear they were simply just adding some facts and they were going to, you know, return. So it kept coming up in the news. And then in particular, after Trump's decision in 2020, that he wouldn't concede the election and that he began to build what is now, you know, often called. called his big lie around the 2020 election, it was also noted at the time that he was attempting to construct a kind of lost cause, like the kind that Gone with the Wind romanticizes. And people kept bringing Gone with the Wind back into the story.

And also one final thing about it, because it's crucial to the way I frame it in this book, which is that in particular after the insurrection on January 6th, the reason why Gone with the wind kept being a kind of lightning rod and a shorthand for the way that we talked about what happened then was to explain the significance of the Confederate flag flying in the U.S. Capitol for the first time, which is the image with which I begin this book. For a younger audience especially, we should remind people, we're talking about a film, but this begins as a novel, a very, very famous novel, an award-winning novel, indeed, 1937.

36. 36, it came out, 37, she won the Pulitzer Prize. Yeah, Margaret Mitchell is the author. It was our only big book. I mean, she wrote other things. It was her only book, yeah. And she writes this thing, and I don't know if it was the timing of the book or what the heck the casting that was in the film. Who knows what really sent this to the stratosphere,

but it was a gigantic book. To this day, one of the most profitable books ever published. Absolutely. Still sells around 300,000 copies a year. Interesting. Which is a number that most authors would give their eye teeth for. I mean, J.K. Rowling would not turn up her nose, you know, at those kinds of numbers, right? So it absolutely was a phenomenon. And as you say, always hard to put your finger on what causes a phenomenon. If somebody could replicate the formula, we'd all be producing such successes. But in a sense, a lot of what I do in this book is try to get at the answer of what made it work and why was it so popular, what has made it stick in the, not just in the American psyche, and strike such a chord

with so many millions of people, first as a novel, and then shortly afterwards as a film. So, as you say, novel comes out in 36, wins the Pulitzer Prize in 37, is kind of making its way across the world. And then David Selznick, the Hollywood producer legendary, snapped up the rights and in a couple of years had filmed it. And it was filmed across 1939, released at the end of 19. 39 and then kind of made its way across the country and then across the world in 1940. So it struck this instant chord in the late 1930s with millions of Americans.

There was a Gallup poll that found that as the movie was about to come out, something like 50% of American adults intended to see the movie on opening weekend, right? I mean, it was that popular. So on the one hand, you have this thing that, as we say, strikes this chord with millions and millions of people, but not just the American psyche. It then proceeded to be an international phenomenon as well. So part of what I'm trying to get out in this book is what about this story, made people respond to it in the way that they did and made its influence so far reaching so pervasive that almost a century after its release we're talking about it still. It's important. I mean, this is one of these epic movies, especially, but the book as well, where there's an intermission between it. I mean, this is a big story and the beginning of it is really the Civil War being fought and then the loss and then the reconstruction of the South, which to this day, and it's a very interesting theme in American society,

Many people are afraid to see Reconstruction for what it really was. Why is Reconstruction such a misunderstood element of the Civil War story? I think that's a really good way of framing that incredibly complex and difficult question. Why is it so misunderstood? And it's misunderstood because there were a lot of people with a vested interest in rewriting it from the start. Reconstruction is the name that Lincoln gave before he was assassinated to what the project of rebuilding the country after emancipation and after Civil War would look like. So it was reconstructing the nation. And in particular, it was about creating what we would now call a multiracial democracy.

The reason that reconstruction was so difficult was because they attempted. I actually love this, but I also realize now that it was doomed to failure that what the United States attempted to do was to go from a race-based slave society to a full multiracial democracy in the space of less than a decade. Yeah. And it totally failed. And it failed because the white supremacists who had enslaved black people were not prepared to admit them as full citizens with voting rights, let alone as legislators or representatives of their government. And so they engaged in a wholesale, deeply violent, deeply deceitful and cynical project of rewriting history in order to shore up the foundations of their own power, justify the war that.

they had just fought and lost, and to ensure that although they had lost the right to enslave other people, they didn't lose any other power or rights as a result of losing the war. In the years after the Civil War, the Republicans have the majorities, and they are able to pass the amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which are the fundamental tools in rebuilding the society as it needs to be. I share your feeling. Incredibly bold vision. They have decided that based on the Declaration of Independence, this is the continuum that we're

on here. Everything that happened with enslavement was about steering the American experience and the American ideal off its tracks. So they're putting it back on its tracks. Not good in the minds of the Southerners and the powers that be down there. And so pretty quickly, speaking about 10 years or so, this thing is entirely undone. Absolutely. It's deconstruction. Very well put. Exactly. And the point is that it was conscious and it was deliberate and it was explicit. Yes. So today, a lot of the ways that we think about racism or racial bias or structural racism, people tend to think of it as being unconscious or as being, you know, maybe self-interest is motivating you, but surely you obscure from yourself. Or maybe you're not even racist, but it just sort of happens, you know. And when you actually

go in and read the primary documents, you read the speeches, you read the debates, what politicians in the South were saying, you read very importantly the testimony of what became known as the clan report in 1871, which was the congressional investigation into the first Ku Klux Klan. in the Deep South, 10,000 pages of firsthand testimony and people from all over the South talking about the racial violence and the white supremacism and the violent reimposition of white supremacism that they had witnessed. And one of the things that you take away from it is that it was totally conscious and it was totally deliberate and it was totally explicit. And that's because they were genuine white supremacists. And so they really thought that white people were better. And therefore

they weren't ashamed to say that. They never apologized for it. They were literally saying black people are not my equals, why are you saying they should vote? Sure. I will do anything to stop black people from voting, including murdering them, including torturing them, dismembering them, whatever it is that is necessary because white people are, you know, in God-given terms, superior to black people. I'll be back with more from Sarah Churchill after this break. First you have the black codes. That leads to Jim Crow. Exactly. Within Jim Crow is a lot of lynching and all kinds of horrible violence that happens.

And it all is taking up this 50-year spread, basically right into the 20s. It's all sort of for me capped by birth of the nation, which is the famous film made by D.W. Griffith, shown in the White House by Woodrow Wilson, that this was the truth, that this whole thing had happened and it all kind of went wrong and we need to fix it. And thank God for these white people down there and their strange white costumes because they're going to heal the nation their way. Yeah. And that's the birth of a nation. Yeah, exactly. So the mythology was that the clan had ridden forth flags flying the cavalry to save the nation. from the scourge of what they called Negro rule,

which meant multiracial democracy, which meant black people in government. But the history of that violence of lynching itself begins really immediately after emancipation. And part of the way that we, I think even people who study U.S. history tend to talk about lynching in terms of the decades in which it peaked

in the 1880s and the 1890s, and then again when it resurged in the 1920s. But again, the documents show that, in fact, it was widespread, it was ongoing really from the late 1860s through the late 1930s, longer than even, I think, many well-educated Americans believe or understand. And we are, in my view, actively discouraged from, by our own popular memory and our own stories about our own history, from engaging with the real horrors.

Even the word lynching itself acts as a kind of euphemism. Interesting. And, like, I think one of the more familiar versions of it comes from something like to kill a mockingbird, right? So we think about Tom Robinson about to be pulled out of the jail and lynched. And the idea is that, you know, a small gang of six to 12 guys is going to pull him out of the jail and they're going to string them up by a rope and they're going to kill them. And that's terrible. And the way to kill a mockingbird, which of course is set in the 1930s, in the Jim Crow South, in exactly the same time as Gone with the Wind comes out. And this is actually really

important to go back to why we're talking about a story from the 1930s now. The way that what happened in the 30s has shaped our mythology is really kind of central to what I'm trying to do in this book. And you know, you began by saying that the subtitle is The Lies America Tells. And the lies that I'm getting at here are not just lies about Civil War and Reconstruction, but lies about the 1930s as well and what we think we know. So Tila Mockingbird is a good example of part of what I'm talking about. So those who remember that story will know that what happens is Tom Robinson is he's going to get pulled out of the jail and lynch to what happens. A little white girl shames the lynch mob into realizing they're actually kind of

cheapish and they mean well and they're going to go home. Interesting. That's not what happened. What happened was that lynch mobs would take little six-year-old white girls, like Scout Finch, to watch a human being tortured and burned at the stake. Sure. And they would advertise it with flyers and they printed it in headlines announcing days in advance that a lynch mob was going to form.

One of the terrible stories that I recount here is the lynching of Sam Hose because it was not far outside of Atlanta where the action of Gone with the Wind takes place. in 1890, right when Margaret Mitchell was about to be born, she was born in 1900. And when Samhose was lynched, they hired a special train so that 2,000 people could travel from Atlanta out into the countryside to watch Sam Hoes be lynched. That is the history, and that was a little over 100 years ago. That is the history of our country. And it is a history that unless you study the history of civil rights, you simply don't know this. And we have, in my view, been unconsciously. Derelict in our responsibility to telling the truth about that history.

Yes, I agree with you. Brainwashed in a way. Yeah, absolutely. Let's get back to Gone with the Wind. In a way, I mean, it's a fun story to participate in, at least in the movie version is Vivian Lee and all the rest of that. The whole thing is just kind of absurdist and soap opera and kind of grand and fun and all that sort of thing, which is a tip of an iceberg of a kind of retelling the story that

is probably, I can't speak for them, obviously, but it seems to me the motivation would have come from, oh boy, even though we wanted it this way, this is a tough thing to sell these people, you know, this kind of society that's dependent on this thing that those people in the north don't like it all. So we better kind of reconstitute this into something that's a softer sell. Let's push forward states' rights as the primary reason that our forefathers did what they did. Maybe it was a mistake, but they had a good thing at heart. They believed in this American ideal of freedom. They believed in states' rights over federal. All that stuff was sort of retold as the way that this was really about because it has some footing in reality. There's some argument there,

but it pushes away the whole horror of enslavement and so forth. There's a lot that happens like that. The daughters of the Confederacy start putting up Confederate statues all over America. That's the story being told now. You know, what sort of writing off as canceling is actually a really important thing that's happening. We're sort of addressing. We're not canceling. We're addressing something that has been sold to us as a bill of goods all these times. But I want to talk about Gone with a Win because it really sells the entertainment value of the retelling of the Southern Story and does very well at that. It wins an Oscar. It hits it out of the park and she gets a Pulitzer Prize over that whole thing. Do you think that's because people wanted to believe this

or it was so seductive that they just had to go with it? And that speaks to the brainwashing that is going on. They were already brainwashed. They already believed it. So it told them what they already believed, but they absolutely wanted to believe. And that's a really, really central part of the story that I tell in this book is about the ways in which Gone with the Wind told white Americans across the North and South divide something that they wanted to hear. They were the victims. They were the victims. They were the victims of black equality.

And what it did was restore white innocence. It restored the idea, as you say, there were good people on both sides, to quote a phrase from a former leader. And as you say, the nation was faced with this really insoluble problem about, you know, you have a secession, you have this violent insurrection, you have a civil war that last for five years. And then how do you bring everybody back together? How do you actually say we're going to recreate a union when the half of the country that had tried to leave were never prepared to conceive defeat? They were never prepared to admit that the moral proposition they had fought for

was wrong. They never said, oh, you're right. You know what? Slavery was bad. We shouldn't have done that. And the other problem, well, there were many problems that spun out from this. But one of them was that, you know, I come from Chicago, right? So I grew up in this kind of very complacent view of, the Civil War, which was that, you know, we were on the side of moral right. The South were probably the bad guys, but the North fought for abolition. So it was a very easy moral space for us to occupy in the North, right? And never stop and think about the fact that what in fact was the case was that people on the North could feel very strongly, violently, go to war to defend the belief that slavery was wrong and have zero problem with racism. Zero problem with racism. White

supremacism was fine. It was just slavery that was immoral. But they were absolutely content for black people to be in fear, to be emancipated and left with no rights whatsoever, with no federal protections whatsoever. So you emancipate four million people and then tell them you're on your own. Yeah, exactly. See you later. No land, no self-sufficiency, no education. We're not going to do anything for you. And then the North is like, well, we did our part. So you're free. Off you go. And guess what? In the United States, freedom is everything, right? So if you're free, well, you should succeed. And if you haven't, well, we all know what that means. That means you didn't work hard enough or try hard enough. Or maybe you're even incapable or

you're failing in some way. Or God doesn't love you as much. or whatever reason we have for justifying the fact that you failed instead of recognizing that you were pretty much set up for failure because you had no way to go from being somebody who had been kept literally in bondage for centuries to suddenly being self-sustaining. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Sarah, please. Let me make sure I'm getting my points here.

May I come back, though, to the point about entertainment as well, because I think it's really important in terms of Gone with the Wind to think about the ways in which, yes, the story tells was gratifying for white audiences to a really extraordinary degree. But two things to add there. One is that part of the story I tell here that I think is really important that, again, has kind of been lost to popular memory, although scholarship has been unearthing it, is the degree of black resistance to gone with the wind from the moment it came out. So black voices were raised saying, what the hell are you people up to? Like, what is this nonsense from the beginning? And indeed talking about its dangers for black Americans. And in particular, the way that they already saw

racist language. They clearly knew that racist language was tied to racist violence. And they mounted a campaign against the use of the N-word in the film because it was used so liberally in the novel. And they said, if you use this word, it will endanger black people. So they understood all of that very clearly. And then it's also important that we recognize that part of, I believe, the lasting value of the film and one of the ways in which it, to me, very clearly, surpasses in technical and stylistic terms, the novel is because of the greatness. of the black performances in it, particularly Hattie McDaniel, who of course becomes the first African-American

to win an Oscar for her performance as Mamie. And she takes what is a very thin stereotype in the novel and turns it into the moral heart of the film and a lot of the comedy of the film. And she drives the film in important ways. Selznick gave her that space as a payoff. There were various kinds of trade-offs about the degree to which these black actors

were being asked to inhabit these racist stereotypes. And one of the things that Selznick did was basically give Haddy McDaniel more screen time in exchange for her agreeing to also play this minstrel stereotype. So it makes the film, I think, more interesting. And still, for all of its racism and the ways in which it's very uncomfortable to watch for modern audiences in important ways in those scenes, Hattie McDaniel subverts those stereotypes, and she gives us a different way of watching the film.

The other thing I'll say about its entertainment value, and for me as a white woman, that I still feel very strongly about, is that it's the first popular story in American history that has a woman as an every woman, every man character that literally everyone identified with Scarlett. And it is a story about human resilience. It is a story about survival and defiance. And for those of us who grew up with it, it's still very hard not to be moved by those moments

where Scarlett says, I will not be defeated. And that part of the story, when we know this from audience responses around the world, is what has registered cross-culturally and particularly in times of war and conflict, the ways in which people have identified with Scarlett, feeling that she was going to survive an occupying army. We know there were Vietnamese readers who loved it during the Vietnam conflict,

and we know the French resistance loved it during the Second World War. There are these stories about the way that people saw in Scarlet, this figure of indomitable human courage. The problem is that Scarlett's on the wrong side of the war, and she's on the wrong side of history. But if we pluck her out of her political context, which is what the story encourages us to do, then there's a lot to liken to find entertaining there.

First, let me go through some statistics. There's 30 million copies. in print, 300,000 more are sold per year, won the Pulitzer Prize. This is a long time ago, and we're talking about it in 2022, say no more. It's a huge story in American culture. Do you think that Margaret Mitchell believed in her bill of goods here? Did she understand what she was doing with this story? Was there an intention behind the fiction to sell this stuff that we were talking about? Is she trying to join in on the retelling of the story of the South? She was, but not in the way that you mean. she absolutely believed in every single thing that she said. She was totally convinced that every word of that book was true. She believed that it was historically accurate. She constantly defended the fact that she had, you know, read every document going, except she had these immense blind spots. What would happen? She'd be like, oh, my God, I read 10,000 documents. I checked every single fact. I spent three weeks establishing that Ashley would have talked about the Gha Damaung because he would have traveled in Europe. And readers asked her about her research into the first clan. And she said, oh, I didn't do any research in the first clan. Everybody knows about the first clan. And she said, oh, I didn't do any research in the first clan. Everybody knows about the first clan. And, and she said,

So she absolutely accepted mythology's wholesale while being convinced of the documentary historical accuracy of what she was saying. What she thought she was doing was writing a revisionist story, which is hard now for people to hear when we think of it as being the ultimate sentimental version of the antebellum years. But for her, because she grew up with the fiction upon which the film Birth of a Nation was based, what was known as plantation fiction, these stories that not only idealized slave plantations and the Antebalam South in terms of how, kind they were to slaves, but also idealized the white people as being. So the women were all delicate, frail southern bells who were all angelic, angels in the house, a very Victorian fiction. And the men were all noble, chivalric, right? So for her, in her mind, Scarlett's very much an anti-heroine. Mitchell talks about the fact that she's not very smart, that, you know, she has no emotional intelligence whatsoever. It takes her 12 years to work out who she actually

loves. One of the things I say in the book is that another book should be a stalker. Like, She will not leave Ashley alone. And she fantasizes about the death of his wife, who is her sister-in-law. I mean, she's a very monstrous character in all kinds of ways, right? And she's mercenary as hell, and she's acquisitive, and that's what she cares about, materialistic to the endth degree. And Rhett is a rogue and a scoundrel, and he's a cad and a card sharp and a gambler and a cynic.

And he's a disaster capitalist, and he's a food speculator. He gets rich off of the starvation of white people in the South who hate him for most of the story for what he does. war profiteer. So she thought that what she was doing was telling a realistic story about the people who survived in the New South. But was she also telling an allegory of the South? Yeah, absolutely. So it was a story about how the Old South burned and the New South rose from its ashes. And Scarlett represents that. Scarlett represents the New South. In fact, what she does is she says that Scarlett was born at the same time as Atlanta and she represents Atlanta. So she makes her an

explicitly representative figure. So exactly that. So Margaret Mitchell did not in all ways admire the New South, but she thought that she was telling a realistic story about how the New South and all of its vulgarity and Nouveau-Riche, you know, materialism had emerged from what she also saw as the idyllic antebellum period. Right. As long as it remains, as it is in 1937, a segregated place, there's still lynchings. There's still all kinds of stuff happening down there. That's an okay version of the New South.

Absolutely. It's when things start getting tested a little while longer. She doesn't live that long, though. She dies sort of young, doesn't she? Yeah. She was killed by a drunk driver, actually, in 1949. She was born in 1900 and died in 1949. So her dates are kind of, again, she herself becomes a kind of allegorical figure for the first half of the 20th century.

If we see her as representative of those attitudes in the South. How is this going to get healed in your mind? After doing this research and writing this kind of book, which is, you know, you're deconstructing the story right here. How does this get retold? Are we in the process already? Are you feeling hopeful? Those are two separate questions. I think we are in the process.

It's hard to look at our political situation right now and feel very hopeful. But I'm more hopeful now than I was probably a year ago. I think that we are telling the story. People have asked me if I think, you know, am I writing this book because, you know, I think the truth will set you free or something like that, right? Very clearly the truth doesn't set you free. But I do believe that you can't be free without the truth. And we are trapped in a series of very, very destructive lies.

So I believe that we have to start telling the truth as a precondition for the possibility that we might heal. So will telling the true story heal us? No, it will not. Can we heal without doing that? I do not think so. So for me, this was partly about, this is a kind of problematic term, but I want to use a word like ownership in its positive sense of accountability in that.

I think that we're encouraged by the ways that we think about identity today to feel like each of us is interested in our own representative histories, but we're not necessarily responsible for other kinds of history, right? So as a white middle class woman, I should be interested in white middle class history. And it's for African Americans to tell African American history and that they should be thinking about that. And I was like, but this is all American history. Yes, exactly.

This is all our story. And I believe profoundly that as white Americans, we have to try to tell the truth about that, not in a maya culpa and not in a way that... That's exactly, that patronizes anybody else or doesn't acknowledge the differences in the ways those histories are going to be viewed by all of the different participants. But to say we still have to recognize that all of this stuff happened. And another way to put it is that the past has consequences today, regardless of whether we know what happened in the past.

But we pretend that that that isn't the case. So we pretend that if we lie about the past, that we... can somehow change what's going to happen. But all that happens is you get confused about why you are where you are because you don't know what were the causes that led us to where we are. And so for me, it's about making it intelligible. How did we get here? Yeah. Ultimately, it's, you're identifying a power play and who are the players and how it's being done. And there's a lot of that going on in politics these days speaking very generally. I am hopeful. I'm going to use this moment to say that just as they did a remarkable amount out of the Civil War in a very short amount of time, there's

something happening in a pretty compressed form right now, which is a lot of stories like yours are being told. There's a lot of popular conversation happening in a relentless fashion. A bit of a band-aid being pulled off has happening. And God bless it. You know, that's what's going on at this moment in this society. And a lot of people are backing off of it and finding ways to apologize for things and stuff like that. But it's happening. There's a process. And I'm proud to be a part of it and that this is going on. And I'm proud to plug your book, The Wrath to Come, written by Sarah Churchwell, Gone with the Wind and The Lies that America Tells, thank you very much. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. Please be aware there will be no episode this coming Monday as it's a public holiday over in England where the show's produced. But I'll be back wherever you get your podcasts next Thursday. In the meantime, happy new year. Wishing you and yours all the best for 2023. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.