"The Power of the Story and Who Gets to Control It"

"David Blight, an American-history professor at Yale, has argued that January 6 is a novel twist on the 'Lost Cause'—the Confederate narrative of noble sacrifice that fueled successful white resistance to multiracial democracy in the years after the Civil War. The original Lost Cause strengthened into a racist political force over decades. When I reached out to Blight to discuss the comparison, he seemed unnerved by how quickly the memory of January 6 had shifted toward revisionism. 'We're in an unusual moment where evidence doesn’t seem to make any difference,' he told me. 'It's in that world that January 6 is being processed as a historical marker.'"

Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic calls January 6 revisionism as "the politics of forgetting."

"Rooted in the Blood of More Than 700,000 Americans Who Died in the Civil War"

"Section 1's origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson's inclusion of equality among 'these truths' in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred."

David W. Blight at The Atlantic responds to Donald Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship.