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Of course, Cato, you are quite right about the presence of graves and monuments in the Northeast. But they are really the only striking reminders of the War up there. In the North no lasting economic damage was done, no buildings (except a few in Gettysburg and Chambersburg) are associated with battles, and there are no daily reminders. In the South the reminders are still there, to be seen daily. Here are all but one of the battlefields; here are vast tracts of land that have never recovered economically from the War; here there are reenactments often played out at the scene of Civil War battles; here are the Civil War Trails programs, thousands of crossroads and houses associated with the War; here are continual fights over presevation of War-related sites.

And here, too, are people who can still see the results of the War in their own lives. When you can drive past the wreckage of a great house that once belonged to your family and know that it would have belonged to your children but for the War--this realization brings the War close, too. In some cases the house is a burned wreck (I have a few bricks from one of my family's burned wrecks, and thank you General Sheridan) while others have been preserved to show us the beauties of the past.

Now, in the North you have a lot of these things, too. The North also has thousands of historic structures, sites, battlefields, museums,and reenactments. But the orientation is not toward the Civil War at all, since it wasn't fought in Connecticut. The concentration of the North is, as you remark, on the Revolution. People in the North lost sons and brothers, but they didn't lose a lot of real estate so there are no ongoing reminders of the Civil War for people to obsess over.

Remember, I used to live quite near you, in Westchester, and my village wsa the site of a Revulationary War battle. While I lived there I was a passionate student of the Revolution, because that was what was available to study.

Fair enough, dear Capriole, the North hasn't felt war since the War of 1812, and than only in a few places. The emphasis is more on the Revolution here, and I think that's a good thing: we all need to be reminded of the sacrifices made for American independence by our (well, yours and mine, at any rate) forebears. The Revolution has the virtue of being primarily a unifying mythology, whereas the Civil War is divisive -- though, perhaps, unifying in the South.

But, at the risk of sounding nativist, I also think an important difference in modern Northern and Southern attitudes towards The War is that so few in the North today haven any sense of personal family connection to The War. The vast ethnic immigrations from the late 19th century on (save in post-modern South Florida, which is now a de facto Latin American country) flooded the industrial North with millions for whom the Civil War had no personal meaning, who were primarily economic immigrants. These are the people whose children and grandchildren favor gun control and provide the backbone of radical liberalism, their stake in American society is primarily economic and many of them have simply not been inculcated since birth with our heritage. It is from these quarters (especially after WWII, as the professoriat changed as a result of the GI Bill -- very few of the scholars who promoted the anti-American revisionist views about American history, and who reject American exceptionalism, are the descendants of those who founded and built this country, and fought its wars.) that America as an idea has been under attack lo these past 50-odd years.