WM: You mention Trump’s “1776 Report.” Do you see any similarities between America’s state-led push for a particular narrative about slavery and Putin’s push to sanitize aspects of the Stalin years?
RC: Of course there are great similarities—I mean, you’ve got 14 states in the country who’ve banned critical race theory from school curriculums. What I was trying to do was look at 2,500 years of history, and I feature discussions on race and gender throughout, showing it’s not just a contemporary issue. Autocrats want to shape the narrative—I know it’s an obvious point, but it’s not one that people necessarily grasp immediately. History has two meanings: It’s the past, and it’s accounts of the past. So you get the past through the filter of other people.
WM: Your book taught me about Winston Churchill’s piece of fan fiction from 1930: Robert E. Lee wins at Gettysburg, abolishes slavery, and ends up averting the First World War. When I went to read that story, it was clear Churchill owed so much to William Archibald Dunning, the American historian who argued that Reconstruction was an antidemocratic tragedy.
RC: Well, remember Churchill was a novelist, and at least half-American, and that he loved to be impish. And so counterfactual history appealed to him, just as a way of annoying people, and it’s continued to do so.
But on Dunning, I took the Civil War as being the most dramatic example of the work of historians as a continual palimpsest of the historians that have been before. Although still a battleground amongst historians, I think that the place of slavery as a cause of the Civil War has now found favor with the vast majority of historians. What’s startling about those first 80 years after the Civil War is how the South won the peace in terms of the historical record. And Dunning’s pupils went on to rule the roost in history faculties throughout large parts of the United States, which was just remarkable.
WM: Does this victory have to do with the failure of Reconstruction?
RC: Yeah, there’s all of that as well. I felt critical of Ken Burns’s not really dealing with Reconstruction in his Civil War series. But with his way of telling the story, I wanted to rejoice in the series itself rather than being super-critical.
WM: But you discuss how Burns enlisted Shelby Foote and might have introduced a certain, shall we say, empathy for the Confederate cause.