Fascinating, isn't it? Here's a thought. History textbooks in southern schools usually used WBTS [sic] through the middle of the twentieth century and probably even later in some states. For the past few decades, however, the term CW has been in almost universal use in school textbooks, movies, and TV. Call it PC or whatever you will, but the change obviously is having an erosional effect on the use of WBTS.

On Friday I asked three classrooms full of southern Arkansas college students about this. Keep in mind that most of the students are white, conservative, small-town folks who claim to have Confederate ancestors. Over 95% said the term CW was used by all their family members, as best they could recall. All apparently had heard of the term WBTS but considered it, and I quote from one student, "an old-fashioned name for the Civil War."

I might add, without meaning to start another thread, that in many of the new history textbooks in use nationwide, including the south, there is very little about the CW and almost nothing about the Confederacy. My son's junior high and high school history texbooks, published by the same company, included photos of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. No pictures in either book of Davis or Lee, or for that matter Grant or Sherman, or any soldiers at all! Things are better at the college level where textbooks are written by real historians, not educationists, but how much longer that will be the case, who can say . . . .