American Civil War revisionism

At this time of renewed discussion about what the American Civil War was all about, and the point of statutes to Confederate figures, it's worth reading this 2001 lengthy review of 3 books on the topic, which the New York Review of Books was kind enough to include on their email.  (I have a suspicion I have read it before, but I'm not sure.)

Also, I was quite surprised to read of the "notorious white county" in Georgia in Slate, and how recently there the racism remained on display:

I was raised in Forsyth County, Georgia, one of the most notorious “white counties” in America, and a place where mob violence was the law of the land for nearly a century. After a young woman was murdered there in the fall of 1912, whites lynched a local black man, then waged a months-long campaign of terror that drove out every last black neighbor. For decades after, residents attacked any nonwhite who dared to step over the county line and kept Forsyth all-white throughout my childhood in the 1970s. In 1987, when a group of locals, including my family, marched to protest the ongoing segregation, we were met by an army of white supremacists who vowed to “Keep Forsyth White” and paraded through the streets of my hometown with nooses slung over their shoulders.

As I said here last week, those on the Right who like to pretend that racial issues in the US were all done and dusted because of civil rights reform in the 1960's are rather silly...