Battle of Antietam, 1862; Confederate dead
Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African-American columnist at the Atlantic, dislikes it when people say that the American Civil War was a “tragedy”. Coates was writing in response to a recent podcast about the Civil War from the “Backstory” American history website.
Coates writes:
The conceded common ground was the following–The Civil War was a tragedy. I think that ground is generally accepted by almost everyone, and for good reasons. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, a shocking figure which doesn’t really capture the toll that this sort of violence took on the country at large. And yet when I think about the Civil War I don’t feel sad at all. To be honest, I feel positively fucking giddy.
His blog post gets us thinking about qualifies as a historical tragedy. Some might dismiss this as a purely semantic issue, but I think there is actually a pretty fundamental question that needs to be asked.
The Past Speaks 