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Date Posted: 07:12:15 11/09/02 Sat
Author: Rattletrap
Subject: The Civil War Analogy (general discussion, no specific spoilers)

I'm liking the Civil War analogy more and more as this series goes on, but it plays on some different associations than most people are used to. A mention of the Civil War invariably conjures up images from "Gone With the Wind," "Glory," "Gettysburg" or any one of the dozens of films that have been made about it. The problem here is that those films are usually set in the Old South (Gettysburg being, of course, an exception)--Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina. In the history book narrative, that is where most of the key battles take place.

It is easy to forget, then, that the war was going on in the much more rugged country to the west--Kansas, Missouri, the Indian Nations (p-d Oklahoma)--and that some of the bloodiest fighting of the war occurred there under people like Quantrill and Stand Watie. Reconstruction had a much smaller impact here, because there was very little to reconstruct. Disorganization and outlawry persisted into the postwar years (e.g. the James and Younger gangs), as did the grinding poverty that plagued the American South well into the 20th century. With that in mind, then, the Civil War analogy for Firefly works much better if we view it as a story about people on the fringes, not about the once proud remnants of a defeated people.

Thoughts?

'trap

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