No need to apologize - I found your mini-autobiography quite interesting. My wife tells the story of being in the fifth grade and reading GWTW in school. When she read the last page she burst into tears and her classmates wanted to know what was wrong. As a child I loved "Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier", and wore out the 33-1/3 album which went with the movie. To this day I can quote lines from that film.

Here's what's probably wrong with me: before I could read on my mother's lap I heard her read "The Highwayman" from Alfred Noyes, with images as seen here from the Childcraft series. I've shown it to students who asked, what mother would read this kind of thing to a small child?
http://hibp.ecse.rpi.edu/~john/loreena.html

The stories you describe have always intrigued me. Then as an adult it hit me that, as much as I didn't want to hear or know about it, Mexicans had their version of the Alamo, too. The same is true of the Civil War, and there are several different sides of that story, not just two. The more I learn about the "other" side of stories, the more it bothers me when people want to treat complex issues as simple good/bad black/white open/shut cases.

Imagine you were a young girl reading "Uncle Toms Cabin" in a Northern community. If you only knew about slavery except through Miss Stowe's prism, what would you think of slaveholders? How might you respond to Federal laws on fugitive slaves?