History isn't just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History Unplugged podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,

and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

A couple of years ago, I did a military history series with co-host James Early, called Key Battles of the Civil War.

And we ended the series by looking retrospectively at the effects of the Civil War in the United States.

And we said that the modern United States are basically an outgrowth of the Civil War.

We're industrial, not agrarian, were tightly knit federal republic rather than a consolation of states.

Now, one of the questions we got to but didn't really dive into was, how do we remember Confederate soldiers? How do we remember Confederate generals? This was during a time period when there was

strong debate about whether or not statues of Confederate generals should This was during a time period when there was strong

debate about whether or not statues of Confederate generals should come down in city squares.

Now, James and I didn't really get into that issue. We mostly said that it's best if local

communities decide that and if they have a referendum and decide to move them, then it's a

collective decision that really needs to be localized as much as possible. What we didn't get into was the much larger question of how do we understand past

historical figures? How do we judge anyone who, if you get back more than one or two generations,

will have an alien valuable system to us? How do we celebrate someone who did good for humanity

when they may have lived two or three hundred years ago,

may have owned slaves in the case of many of the founding fathers, and may have done and said

things that would have been reprehensible today? How do you separate someone who was a product of his time,

yet contributed to the universal good of humanity, and someone who is understood as being

universally corrupt or evil like

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