In his 1926 comic masterpiece, The General, Buster Keaton plays the protagonist Johnny Gray, a Southerner declared unfit for active service in the Civil War but determined to fight for the Confederacy anyway. Defending the Southern sympathies of the film, Keaton explained, “It’s awful hard to make heroes out of the Yankees.”

Keaton’s stance wasn’t unique. The majority of American films dealing with the Civil War side with the Confederacy, finding it easier to make heroes of those who lost a war and fought to preserve chattel slavery. Key among them are Birth of a Nation (1916) and Gone With the Wind (1939), both acclaimed “Lost Cause” romances featuring kindly plantation owners, happy slaves, and gallant Confederate soldiers hopelessly outnumbered by marauding Yankees.

Gone With the Wind is, for many, the perfect expression of the “Lost Cause” rewrite of American history, celebrating an agrarian paradise of moonlight and magnolias. The film’s opening shots of contented slaves wandering home from the fields at sunset represent a beautiful, blameless world about to be overrun by “dollar-loving Yankee” hordes determined to free slaves who have no desire to be free. As the accompanying title-crawl reads: