QUOTE : in the early 1960s, the final legal end of white supremacy came into sight. And as a result, certain white Southerners started displaying Confederate symbols, and Southern states retrofitted state flags to include them. It was a historical rhyme of what had happened a century earlier, when losing the war led Southerners to glorify Dixie and the Lost Cause. After the Civil War, historians started calling the decades before 1861 the antebellum era—for many white Southerners, a word connoting fantasies of a perfect Old South. Antebellum is Latin for “before the war”—any war. After the wars of the 1960s—after Vietnam, “the Negro revolt,” the countercultural explosion—plenty of Americans mythologized the 1940s and ’50s and early ’60s as their own late lamented antebellum era.