Well I finished the story of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. It was quite a read. Some thoughts: MM view of history is informed by being a Southern Woman in the 1930's. This was approximately 65 to 70 years after the Civil War. There were still a few around who were alive during that time. The South of her girlhood and adulthood was still smarting from the defeat. The Lost Cause school was going strong among popular historians and During the 20 and 30's the new medium of The Movies. Birth of a Nation gave popular voice to this view to millions of small town rural Americans and it became received wisdom to many. Slavery was mainly a benign institution, "the Negro" was not fully human and was more childlike and actual loved their masters, that it was Northern abolitionists, who for their own gain, "stirred up" the slaves. After the war the freed slaves and the Northern Carpetbaggers aided by Southern "scalawags" oppressed the south. And the...