Volume 33, Number 12 · July 17, 1986
Gone with the Wind
By C. Vann Woodward
Why the South Lost the Civil War
by Richard E. Beringer, by Herman Hattaway, by Archer Jones, by William N. Still Jr.
University of Georgia Press, 582 pp., $29.95
Inevitability is an attribute that historical events take on after the passage of sufficient time. Once the event has happened and enough time has passed for anxieties and doubts about how it was all going to turn out to have faded from memory, the event is seen to have been inevitable. Different outcomes become less and less plausible, and before long what did happen appears to be pretty much what had to happen. To argue about what might have happened or whether and why the presumably inevitable turned out to be thought so strikes many people as a waste of time.
Review, 4305 words
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