The Lost Cause — the Civil War, Then and Now

Are we still living with the racial divide left over from the Civil War? This provocative audio documentary explores the history of a conflict that nearly tore America apart. Has it resurfaced today in the anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in the 2024 election, the resistance to DEI and to a more inclusive telling of American History?

We explore the enduring myth of The Lost Cause, a revisionist history contrived right after the Civil War. It cast the Confederacy’s humiliating defeat in a treasonous war for slavery as the embodiment of the framers’ true vision for America – and pushed the idea that the Civil War was not actually about slavery.

On this program you’ll hear former U.S. Senator Doug Jones (Alabama), as well as a Pulitzer-winning author and other leading American historians, explaining the ideology that came to be known as The Lost Cause.

Over a third of all white families in the South actually owned human beings. And their 4 million African American captives had a monetary value estimated at $126 billion in today’s money.

So the Confederacy and its hero Gen. Robert E. Lee were defending the largest financial asset in the American economy, second only to real estate. But the death toll from the Civil War was brutal – now estimated at 750,000, the equivalent today of more than 7 million soldiers lying lifeless. We examine how this this history continues to reverberate today.