In this country, we never practiced chattel slavery (or anything like it) with white people. There was indentured servitude, to be sure, but this institution didn’t remotely resemble the enslavement of black or Native American peoples.

I’m also not sure why you believe that “the truth” has never been told about slavery. For instance, the fact that slavery has existed in different times and placed throughout recorded history is commonly mentioned in history books and in discussions of slavery.

You’re right to point out that the U.S. Civil War was not a simple conflict about ending slavery. The South was fighting for more than the mere preservation of its slavery-based economy, and the North’s stance on slavery was decidedly ambiguous.

The North deserves to shoulder its share of blame for slavery, as the North practiced slavery and profited heavily by it. Any attempt to describe American slavery as being primarily about the South is misguided at best.

What, however, does this tell us here? How, for instance, do you believe that Keating got his story wrong about any of this?