The "Second Draft of History"

It's said that Journalism is the "first draft of history", which makes the bias of the news media a big concern.  The best demonstration of bias isn't what's written, but what isn't written - subjects deemed unworthy of examination tend to fall on one side of the ideological mid-line.

Historians write the second draft of history, as it were.  With the far leftwards slant of Universities in general and Liberal Arts in particular, it's no surprise to find precisely this same sort of problem.  Foseti observes it in action, in a history of the War Between the States:

Goldfield, our author, suggests that the Civil War was caused by religious zealotry in the North. The religious zealots could not stand slavery. Their religiousness made them willing to go to great lengths to perfect their society – this meant ending slavery by force, if necessary.

I’ve covered this before – abolitionism is obviously the cause of the war though it’s currently fashionable to blame “slavery” while ignoring the fact that every other slave-holding country ended slavery without resorting to the mass slaughter of its own citizenry and that slavery had existed in the US for a very long time without requiring mass slaughter.
One point for Goldfield for correctly understanding the causes of the war.

Goldfield’s story gets absurd when he discusses the end of the war. He believes that after 4 years of war that killed the modern equivalent of 10 million people, Northerners gave up their religious extremism, went home, and started the industrial revolution.

...

Instead, what happened was that the Northerners continued to try to perfect the conquered South. The results were devastating and continued for years. Read the intro to this book for the best short description that I’ve found. Only after many more years of failure and destruction – and how could they not fail at making model citizens out of people who were just removed from slavery? – did the Northerners give up. Ignoring the tragedy of reconstruction is fashionable, but inexcusable.

Good luck finding this discussed in the classroom, though.  A history of the Progressives' many and bloody failures would be interesting indeed.  But it's what isn't published that tells the tale.