I didn’t share my own guilt and my own shame of growing up believing a series of lies about the Civil War and its legacy. The same lies that have infected our nation. To convince my colleagues, to convince anyone, I had to change my narrative. In subsequent conversations, in new lectures, in new books, in this book, I must tell my story as honestly as possible, even though it reveals a racist past, my own racist past. Telling my story might provide a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War remained buried beneath layer after layer of myth and even outright lies, and why they
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