The thread of partisan power and control is stitched through America’s public education system. In the name of the revisionist Lost Cause history — which holds that the South fought the Civil War over states’ rights and not to maintain the institution of slavery — the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the early 20th century leveraged the group’s considerable political influence and went after school curricula. The UDC lobbied for ahistorical, pro-South school materials, and its members joined Southern state textbook commissions where they helped control which books would be deemed suitable for children and which would not. For the next several decades, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.
