Lessons from History

For the past five years every summer I've been obsessed with learning about the Civil War. It's as if as soon as you can hear crickets in the evening and my scholarly attentions are freed from the semester, my Civil War mania sets in. It's gotten progressively stronger each summer.
I've always loved the era, the mid to late 19th century America; oh the fabrics and dresses! The literature and poetry! The era of change and decision! Steam boats, Mark Twain and the expansion West! I love my imagined worlds of both the North and South, as a girl especially inspired by Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
My true mania started in earnest when I first read Gone with the Wind at nineteen. Sounds a little cliche, but it happened. I wanted a used hardback copy, and ordered one online on bookfinder.com. I received a lovely old copy with a sturdy spine and clean pages; it would have been the perfect edition had it not carried the pungent odor of cigar smoke. Even getting near the old book I was overwhelmed with it. I tried several cleansing and odor-removing techniques, which only ever partially worked. Once I placed Bounce dryer sheets in some of the pages and left it in the sun for a few hours. It only made the book smell like a perfumed parlor clouded with cigar smoke. However the reading of the book was only enhanced by its peculiar smell, and now whenever I catch a whiff of cigar or pass through a hotel's smoking area, my eyes glaze over and images of Tara come wafting through my imagination. I don't think I've ever read a book I was so swept away with in quite the same way.
So I started with Civil War fiction, and then progressed to full-on history books. I haven't worked up to Shelby Foote's volumes - maybe next summer. This summer I've started with David William's A People's History of the Civil War, the Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton, and have been supplementing it with Ken Burn's PBS documentary volumes on the Civil War. All of which are excellent, particularly Williams' book - excellently written and truly a history book for a new generation of historians.
What has been most pertinent to me and my most recent studies has been the number of commentators, politicians and layman who could foresee with unnerving precision the outcome of the war before it began. It was almost as if a knowledge of how the war would end was in an undercurrent of the common consciousness.
It has given me a new confidence in my own voice; a new feeling that my senses are to be trusted. I have never supported the choice to enter into this war in Iraq, but I always quietly doubted myself because so many intelligent people around me thought it was a good idea. But I've never thought this war will have a positive outcome. I think it was a foolish and reckless undertaking that will never and can never end with 'success.' You simply cannot put democracy onto another civilization. Democracy is something to seek after, to earn and to create - it cannot simply be 'set up.'
Also in my study of the Civil War, I've seen how much one man's decision can truly determine a nation's direction. I am not comparing the two wars, but merely noticing aspects that haven't changed in social and political constructs. I'd rather not go into my opinions about President Bush (I'm tired of dredging up such angry and frustrated feelings), so I'll simply say that one man (especially a president) can cause waves of change for generations.
My summer manias are fulfilling, and I think Civil War history is intricate and fascinating, and paraphrasing what Shelby Foote has said, you cannot understand fundamentally the history of the United States unless you have a full comprehension of the Civil War. I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but I'm sure I'll get it in a few more summers :).