Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.
What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don't fight war on our soil, we don't have direct experience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give to it.
I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.
The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.
We want to keep the actual Civil War experience alive.
I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.
I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?