Template:Wikipedia:Featured Editorial/February
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
In the Land of Cotton: An Immigrant to Dixie Examines the "Lost Cause"
I was born, raised, and "educated" in Southern California. In the California public school system I was sustained on a steady diet of anti-South propaganda and revisionist history. I was taught that the Republicans, with "Ole Honest Abe" Lincoln at the helm, were responsible for "saving the Union" from those who sought to destroy it in order to perpetuate and extend Southern slavery. As do millions of patriotic American schoolchildren every year, I memorized the Gettysburg Address, listened with rapt attention to stories of the Underground Railroad, and thrilled to read of the military exploits of such Northern Generals as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.
Influenced by a steady barrage of sixty second sound-bites on the evening news and the elaborate, yet fanciful, "reality" concocted by the movie-moguls in Hollywood, a Southern drawl would invoke instant images in my mind of sheet-clad imbeciles dancing around a burning cross, or some beer-bellied, tobacco-spitting "redneck" hurling racial slurs at "persons of color." The "Mason-Dixon Line" was to me an unscalable wall of separation between the socially sophisticated and open-minded North and the morally degenerate and bigoted South. It was a line I never wanted to cross.
However, about ten years ago, I had a "great awakening." Everything that I had been taught about the South and the so-called "Civil War" of 1861-1865 -- more accurately known as the War for Southern Independence -- started to crumble as I began to read what the Southerners themselves had to say. All my life I had been told one side of the story -- that of the victor. But don't the "losers" have a story to tell as well? Was the War really fought over the issue of slavery, as we have been told, or was it fought for other reasons? continued...
