Performance Notes: On the overall Lost Cause episode, maybe open with something like 'You've heard

it said a thousand times that history is written by the victors. In the case of the Civil War, it just isn't so.
Unless you're a serious student, it's very likely that a good deal of what you think you know about the
USA's most important conflict is wrong in important ways. You think wrongly about it because you
were taught wrongly about it. Millions of people have been victims of this miseducation since the end
of the war. And it is not an accident.'

Maybe also mention something like: 'In the totalitarian 'hermit kingdom' of North Korea, every single
interaction between the country's leadership and the rest of the world is portrayed to the North Korean
people as an epic victory of the righteous Supreme Leader over the foreign 'wolves.' This is true for the
most mundane exchanges, and even for those that are objectively embarrassing. The reason North
Korea pushes this propaganda is obvious: it uses its state-controlled media to shape how its people
perceive its leadership. In politics, even totalitarian politics, perception and reality create each other. In
the wake of the Civil War, something similar happened in the regimes of the South. As a massive face-
saving effort, Southerners who still clung to their national cause began to build a version of history that
had very little to do with reality and everything to do with making the South look good after a crushing
and total defeat.

The Lost Cause Mythology is the set of arguments with which Lost Cause advocates consciously
sought to establish a retrospectively favorable account of the Confederate people and their short-lived
nation. Among other points, these ex-Confederates denied the importance of slavery in triggering
secession, blamed sectional tensions on abolitionists, celebrated antebellum Southern slaveholding
society, portrayed Confederates as united in waging their war for independence, extolled the gallantry
of Confederate soldiers, and attributed Northern victory to sheer weight of numbers and resources.

Much of this view amounts to a self-serving caricature of the true history of the war, but it transcended
region to make its way into popular American understanding. Vehicles that abetted this process
included Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Shelby Foote's widely admired works, and the
National Park Service.

Sub-topics:

The National Park Service and the Lost Cause (Monuments and memorials, battlefield paraphernalia)

Gone With the Wind and the Lost Cause

Jubal Early and the Birth of the Lost Cause Mythology

The Whole Truth About States' Rights and the Civil War
From Gary Gallagher's Introduction to 'The Myth of the Lost Cause':

'White Southerners emerged from the Civil War thoroughly beaten but largely unrepentant. Four years
of brutal struggle had ravaged their military-age male population, vastly altered their physical
landscape and economic infrastructure, and destroyed their slave-based social system. They grimly
acknowledged the superior might of US military forces and understood the futility of further armed
resistance.

Yet the majority of ex-Confederates, who had remained hopeful of establishing a new slaveholding
republic until late in the conflict, did not believe they had fought for an unworthy cause. During the
decades following the surrender at Appomattox, they nurtured a public memory of the Confederacy that
placed their wartime sacrifice and shattering defeat in the best possible light. This interpretation
addressed the nature of antebellum Southern society and the institution of slavery, the
constitutionality of secession, the causes of the Civil War, the characteristics of their wartime
society, and the reasons for their defeat.

Widely known than and now as the Lost Cause explanation of the Confederate experience, it drew
strength from the pages of participants' memoirs, from speeches at veterans' reunions, from ceremonies
at the graves of soldiers killed while serving in Southern armies and other commemorative events, and
from artwork with Confederate themes.

The architects of the Lost Cause acted from various motives. They collectively sought to justify their
own actions and allow themselves and other former Confederates to find something positive in an
all-encompassing failure. They also wanted to provide their children and future generations of white
Southerners with a 'correct' narrative of the war. Some tried to create a written record that would
influence later historians.

In terms of shaping how Americans have assessed and understood the Civil War, Lost Cause
warriors succeeded to a remarkable degree. Robert E Lee serves as an obvious example of that
success. The commander of the army of Northern Virginia was the preeminent Lost Cause hero
(by focusing on him rather than on Jefferson Davis, ex-Confederates could highlight the military
rather than the far messier political and social dimensions of the war), and by the second decade of
the twentieth century Lee had joined Abraham Lincoln as one of the two most popular Civil War
figures. Ulysses S Grant, second only to Lincoln among those who had forged the Union triumph,
inspired far less enthusiastic admiration than did the principal rebel chieftain.

From Nolan's essay 'The Anatomy of a Myth':

Key Resource: Alan T Nolan's essay 'The Anatomy of the Myth' in 'The Myth of the Lost Cause and
Civil War History' by Gallagher and Nolan