I just finally watched the Ken Burns documentary, “The Civil War”. I think I was out of the country the first time it ran. I remember hearing rave reviews, but I didn’t see how 12 or so hours on a war could hold one’s attention.<\/p>\n
Boy, was I wrong. It is probably the best documentary I’ve ever seen. It really adds perspective to the nation. To think — it happened less than 100 years before I was born. That’s not very long ago. <\/p>\n
A comment made almost at the very end sticks in my mind: Before the war they would say, “The United States are..” After the war they said “The United States is…”. We went from a loose confederation of separate “states” (which in those days was almost synonymous with “country”) to a single united entity.<\/p>\n
Before the war you might argue that the association was freely entered into, and should be open to freely depart from. Lincoln disagreed, and forced the issue. If he had allowed the South to split off, later there might have been other disagreements and fractures, and we would have ended up as many small countries. It was forcing the union that brought our current greatness.<\/p>\n
The theme song keeps playing in my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just finally watched the Ken Burns documentary, “The Civil War”. I think I was out of the country the first time it ran. I remember hearing rave reviews, but I didn’t see how 12 or so hours on a war could hold one’s attention. Boy, was I wrong. It is probably the best documentary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}