The Invisible Counterpoint

If "Captain America: Civil War" somehow was occurring in our actual world, it's a no-brainer as to which side — Cap's, who wants to keep the Avengers independent; or Iron Man's, who believes the team should essentially part of the security force of the United Nations — is right, the more progressive: the genuine evolution as to where the Avengers must go. Cap's would represent a sort of childish nationalism, where one country stands apart from the world because it can't see global cooperation as something other than entanglements and forced passivity, a curtailing of freedom: America as it was in the world until about Obama. Iron Man's would represent an adult appreciation that respecting the global community is the best way to not be a sort of global antagonist: the kind of force Vision talks about in the world that baits nations into warfare and terrorism that could have been drawn peaceful. But in this film world, overall, Iron Man's s...

Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves' abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious, violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates Southern whites' violence against black people before and after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants, and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers – anyone who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working, business-friendly American progress. And he counts the South as a victim of that Northern evangelical crusade. Southerners were ...