But implicitly more 'recently affecting' than even WWII, to my mind. Fascinating!

The attitude in the American South towards the Civil War is something that is very hard to explain unless you've lived there. Frankly, even most American Northerners have no clue how large it looms in many Southerners' minds. I'm sure this is at least in part because it is less recent than WWII and can thus be more effectively and thoroughly mythologized, but it's not that simple.

I had a history professor in college who was a Northerner, Princeton/Yale educated, whose Ph.D. was on the colonial history of Georgia. I had him for a Civil War and Reconstruction class. There were three very put-upon students from the South (two from Texas and one from Tennessee) in that class and by mid-semester, we all hated him. We weren't even what you would call dyed-in-the-wool Southerers (or we would not have been attending a very Leftist liberal arts college in the Midwest in the first place) and we were so sick of being asked about our "Southern points of view" we all wanted to tell him to get off his self-important Ivy League butt and try actually living Georgia for awhile so he would at least know what he was talking about.