Who Needs History

“It was my first introduction to damn Yankees,” my oldest sister remarked of her first semester at James Madison University in the fall of 1982. It was here, at this university nestled in the mountains of Virginia and named after one of the state’s most famous sons, that her Northern dormitory suite-mates were horrified by such flagrant abuse of their delicate and enlightened sensibilities.

My sister’s crime? Being unapologetically Southern. See, she had not only hung on the wall an ornamenta...