Watching a Documentary...

...about Reconstruction and am mildly placated by one historian's linking of the era with the later civil rights struggle; he argues that "We see the legacy of Reconstruction. It took generations for [the promise of Reconstruction] to play out, but it never died."

Mmmm... That whole federal-abandonment-and-southern-rewriting-of-history thing still rankles though. Sometimes, there's a reason (or four million of them) that "Lost Causes" are lost.