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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MaxKaladin" data-source="post: 1159051" data-attributes="member: 1196">This is usually the primary problem.  People look for simple, easy to digest and regurgitate answers -- preferably ones with a clearly defined good side and bad side -- and hopelessly distort things in the process.  Your civil war example is a prime candidate.  You have a bunch of people on one side who believe the civil war was about slavery and that the northerners were righteous, crusading paladins struggling to free the oppressed slaves from their evil southern oppressors and ignore all the economic and political questions like states rights.  You have another side that wants to portray the south as idealistic, freedom-loving men fighting valiantly in an ultimately doomed struggle to protect their ideals, chief among them states rights, against an implacable enemy determined to impose its will on them and stifle their freedom.  This side tends to gloss over that whole slavery thing and the fact that there were very real injustices going on.  The problem is it isn't that cut and dried.  Both sides tend to ignore the fact that powerful people in both the Confederacy and the Union had very real economic issues at stake (look up the effect of tarriff policy, for instance) and they ignore the validity of anything the other side says.  When you actually look at the sources, you tend to find that most of the actual issues of contention were about states rights or economics.  However, the dispute over slavery is one of the bigest reasons these issues were important.  That was what made those questions important.  The issue of having the right to seceed, for instance, wouldn't have come up without the dispute over slavery.  So, both sides are partially right, but the issues are complicated and that doesn't satisfy a lot of people who want their history cut and dried with simple, one word or short phrase causes and a clear division of who was good and who was evil.  They don't want the real history, or even the Reader's Digest condensed version.  They want the synopsis of the plot of the movie that was made about the event.</blockquote>

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