Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them.
When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.
We want to keep the actual Civil War experience alive.
I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.
Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.
The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.
Had we settled in Pennsylvania, there's no way I would have written a Confederate novel.
I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.