“I have no opinion on "Confederacy", whatever that is, other than to automatically distrust anyone who claims to be against it, or who claims to be for it.”

The Annoying Orange was an Internet thing in 2009, way before it made it to TV and remains an Internet thing to this day.

I grew up in the Atlanta area, and my best friend was from a very southern Alabama family. They taught me all kinds of confederate apologetics that I would eventually come to realize were all bunk. "States rights" is one of those big lies. The Confederate constitution was pretty much a copy/paste of the US one, but with a few changes that actually gave the states fewer rights. Of course a big difference in the two constitutions was the preservation of slavery in the Confederates.
I went to college in the south and in my freshman US history course was assigned to read Apostles of Disunion. The book is pretty much a compendium of speeches and writings by Confederate leaders where they explicitly say succession is primarily to preserve the institution of slavery.
The silliest thing that family told me was that Yankee spies would go to Confederate camps and replace the grits with cream of wheat to destroy morale. The absurdity of this hit me later when I realized a dumbass spy would substitute an enemy's food rather than steal or sabotage it. Going hungry would be much worse than eating cream of wheat.

Holy shit, you mean someone put it ON TELEVISION?

It's not like there haven't been defenses of the confederacy in the mainstream media, but I choose to take this one on face value. "JUST SAY SLAVERY" are words to remember. Someone needs to put that on a fucking T shirt.

Let's not forget that SLAVERY was once universal in America, not just in the south. Contrary to popular belief, no one was ever burned at the stake in Colonial America, or Salem , anyway, but is at least one instance of people being burned at the stake, for participating in a slave revolt. It happened in fucking Manhattan, in 1712. Twenty slaves were burned to death, including one pregnant woman, and one was broken on a fucking wheel. I was past 40 when I learned about that, pretty much by accident in an obscure 19th Century history book I found on the Gutenberg project.

Oh, Apu? Thanks for clarifying his primary personality traits, I’ll have it put into Wookieepedia.

Not related to the confederacy, but something very similar happened to me during my citizenship test; the question was about what the President's cabinet does.

@cognitivedissonance

The other day, I mentioned Vanilla Ice to a young married couple with an eight-year-old child and they were, like, "Who?"

And then I aged a thousand years and crumbled to dust in the space of a few seconds like the guy who drank from the wrong grail in "Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade.'

Which is another reference I presumed they didn't get.

Yes, "The Simpsons" is popular, but there are likely people who don't know who the fuck Apu is... or was. Isn't he no longer on the show?

Yeah, I've seen this point of view expressed in here before, but I've never caught it when it was fresh before. I think you're peeved because you want a work of politics, not a work of history.

Show us in the text. The biggest mention of states rights that I can think of in Ken Burns' The Civil War is something said by Shelby Foote that was once horribly misquoted in here once before, when Foote discusses the concept as "what the Confederate soldier would say" to justify the Confederate cause. He never says it's his opinion. I'm reminded of a kid in a medieval literature class who thought the professor, who was an emeritus past 70, was trying to convert us all to the early medieval Christianity of Beowulf.

He was astonished. "My God, man, I don't believe it! I may be the most profound atheist in this department!"

Shelby Foote never says he believes it was about state's rights. It's not in the text, and since that would be a stupid thing for a Civil War historian , it's a stupid thing to assume. You have to go by the words he says, and what the word means.

Part 1 is all about slavery, which is not romanticized. From an archive recording, you hear the voice of a former slave "you ain't nothing but a dog.", he says. Dredd Scott, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, the murder of an abolitionist editor, Uncle Tom's cabin, a senator beating another senator on the floor: These are some the events that are recounted leading up to the war. The economics that are discussed are the economics of slavery. The cotton gin made slavery profitable in the south, after it had become obsolete nearly everywhere else.