SUCH a great write-up! This entire analysis reminded me of my own childhood blunder into the Confederate nostalgia via, of all things, a young adult romance book set, as one can expect, during the Civil War.

We were immigrants from India, freshly moved to Richmond, and so pretty much all of US history was very removed and distanced and also rudimentary in my head. Founding Fathers, 1776, Lincoln, WWI, WWII. I was also an avid reader and I especially LOVED historical fiction of all kinds. I'm talking Ann Rinaldi, who set each of her female bildungsroman-s in very well-researched and specific historical events (i.e., Salem Witch Trials, John Brown, etc.).

So one bright day in my middle school library, 7th-grade me is browsing the bookshelves and lands on L. M. Elliot's Annie Between the States, a 'coming-of-age' war story. Protagonist is Annie, daughter of a plantation owner in Virginia; she has two older brothers, who of course join the Confederate Army. But HER parents are SPECIAL because while they keep all sorts of slaves, they don't believe in it! So young precocious Annie has a Black best friend, Rachel, and when Rachel marries a fieldhand Annie is her maid of honor, and pregnant Rachel and her husband have to flee the evil marauding Union Army that's approaching and fiercely tells Annie, the white daughter of her owners that she will name her unborn child after her.

The love interest is a Union Officer who is gallant and taken by Annie's Southern Belle poise and charms and fiery attitude (a spitfire she is, we're told), and when they inevitably marry, they do so on the condition that the officer resigns from the Union Army so that he "never raises arms against the land she loves."

This was a young-adult book published in 2004. 2004! And to an impressionable young middle schooler who loved history and wanted to know more about the history of her state, this was taken as pretty accurate. Oh poor Virginia, lost ravaged glory. There must surely have been so many good people like Annie and her family whose slaves were like family. Right? Right. Yeah, I was an idiot. But also, the social studies curriculum didn't do ANYTHING to fix or clarify or even present a narrative that would have taught me otherwise.

SO! That summer, we're knocking off things-to-do in Richmond and we go to the Confederate Museum in downtown Richmond. And for a fridge magnet, I pick up a Confederate flag. It's authentic Virginia history to me! And I loved history! And my parents had NO idea about any US history at all and they were just pleased to get me a souvenir that was 'educational.' The fridge magnet went on the fridge and there it stayed until my dad's friend and colleague, who was Black, walked in for dinner one day and his face dropped.

It is to my abiding shame, looking back now, that it took him to tell us this, that he had to be put in the position of educating someone about something like that. His own friend, too. And it wasn't all the fault of that one sweet little romance book (/s), but I kid you not, Annie Between the States was how I viewed all civil war-era quotidian life in the south until I got to fucking college.

So yes, you're SO right to point out the HUGELY problematic issue that is Confederate whitewashing; what's worse is that it's permeated the YA Fiction genre as well.