On Mon, 1 Jan 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
> What two new names? I remember it being called the Civil War in a newsreel
> from about 1913. My mother-in-law was taught about the War Between the
> States when she was a school girl in the '40s. My understanding is that the
> two names go back over 100 years, with the Civil War being used in the North
> and the War Between the States in the South. Historians have looked at the
> type of war, and have settled on the Southern term as more accurate.
> Dan'm Traeki Ring of Crystallized Knowledge.
Actually, no. During the Civil War, everyone, North and South, called it
the Civil War. The term War Between the States arose after the Civil War
at the behest of a group of Southern historians - the Lost Cause school,
essentially, who went on and on endlessly about the nobility of the
Southern cause and how the war had to be fought and so on. They did a
great deal of harm to American historiography, in my opinion, as they
deliberately set out to obscure the racial component of the Civil War and
legitimize the Southern position - largely through hagiographies of Robert
E. Lee and so on. Almost all historians now refer to it as the American
Civil War, except those who are (in my opinion) ideologically committed to
what is, in my opinion again, a fairly tendentious view of American
history. Source - a lecture on the topic by William Gienapp, Harvard
professor of American History.
Gautam Mukunda
