What You Will Not Find

• Everything you want to know. There is too much information about the Civil War for anyone to compile it comprehensively, and I am just one woman in the Pacific Northwest.
• Conversations about modern political parties. The parties of today share only names with the parties of the 1860s. And it’s not as if the parties just flipped-- they have just been reamalgamated so many times that they are no longer recognizable.
• Detailed military history. Military movements and strategies are well-documented and there is less debate over that information. Plus, military history makes me sleepy.
• Significant discussion of Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, the Civil Rights Movement, or other parts of US history that were responses and reactions to slavery and emancipation.
• Anyone shouting “the South is bad!” The South is not and was not a monolith and suggesting everyone in the South was an evil slaveowner is both ahistorical and self-contradictory-- who did the enslavers of the 19th century typically enslave if not Black Americans who were Southerners themselves?
• Anyone shouting "the South were unwitting victims!" Secession is treason. Southern states chose to secede. Virtually every nation responds harshly to treason. Confederate leaders knew what they were doing and it's insulting to them and the Civil War dead to suggest otherwise.
• Anyone idolizing or demonizing Lincoln, Lee, Davis, Grant, or other major players in the War.
• An explanation as to why a cult of personality developed around Robert E. Lee and not Jefferson Davis. If you know, please tell me.