Confederates in the Attic

The writer spent a long time going through the South and trying to find out how the people there feel about the Civil War. It turns out that, for many, the war is not over at all. The people he met ranged from those who have an academic interest in the war and that's it, to those who still live and breath the war and still have the same hatreds that the war inspired.

He meets people who re-enact the battles, and find there's a wide range in even that group, from those who like to do the re-enacting but sort of haphazardly to those who are hard core and who wear all the proper clothing down to the smallest detail and who sleep out under the same conditions and even eat the same food.

I was surprised about how deep some of the feelings still are in the South. The book is not that old, either (1998), so it's possible that some of the roots of today's Tea Party and super-patriot groups may very well lie in the feelings still left about the Civil War. Remember that a good part of the South's feelings about that involved a strong belief in State's rights and limited federal government 'interference' in what went on within individual states. Sound familiar?

This is a good example of how knowing about history can help us understand things that are going on in today's world.

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