Having just finished re-watching Ken Burns' Civil War for the first time in 20 years or so, like a freshman psychology student who now understands the motivatio

Having just finished re-watching Ken Burns' Civil War for the first time in 20 years or so, like a freshman psychology student who now understands the motivations of the entire world, there is a line in the documentary, stated I believe by Shelby Foote, that stuck with me > Before the war, it was said, "The United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. After the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious. That sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is." * I certainly, today, think of the U.S. as a whole, not as a collection of independent states, and consider the issue of states' rights to be a generally pointless debate. * Ignore the issues for a moment with the documentary itself and with Shelby Foote, who has stated Nathan Bedford Forrest is "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history" -- seriously, I don't even know what to do with that. And I don't know if they did their footwork -- a textual analysis of, say, newspapers prior and subsequent to the Civil War saying "the United States are" compared to "the United States is." From what I've seen regarding issues with the documentary, I would question it, but I don't know for certain. Some things they seem to have done good scholarly work on; others, not as much.