The Mythology of the Lost Cause

Shakespeare enters into the book most heavily at the end of the book when I talk about some of the myths we have inherited from the Civil War. The real issue here and why one of the motivations for writing the book is that I think we emerged from the war with a distorted sense of what American military might can accomplish. And I think we've turned the Civil War into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed what are really raw and unpleasant truths.