Problematic History

How we misunderstand the Civil War—and ourselves

Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind (1936)

Today “problematic” is often used as shorthand for “morally unacceptable.” It is a boundary that signals what you must not question and what you should not say. But this colloquial usage is nearly the inverse of its original meaning.

If we look back to the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary , we fin…