(Part 2) Top products from r/imaginarymaps

I like the Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations, very good reference for maps. Jean Manco's Ancestral Journeys and Blood of the Celts both have maps that look particularly good as well, in a purely aesthetic sense.

Good news -- not only is he alive, he's got a book out! https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393081923/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

https://www.amazon.com/Island-Crimea-Vassily-Aksyonov/dp/0394524314

Timeline here: https://www.deviantart.com/ynot1989/art/The-Atlantean-Century-1910-817375612

Check out Turtledove's books if you haven't read them yet.

> is it not true that the soldiers of the South, mostly poor, non slave owners, were fighting more for Southern pride and less for Slavery?

Honestly, not really. The idea of "Southern pride" as a principal motivator is correct in the abstract, inasmuch as individuals talked about the slights to Southern dignity and identity posed by the Union, but it has been greatly exaggerated in the years post-Appomattox compared to what folks actually said and wrote during the sectional conflict. We tend to underestimate the degree to which soldiers were aware of the conflict around them or motivated by "bigger" concepts that personal security or honor; the truth is that many Confederate soldiers were explicitly aware that slavery was the source of the division between North and South, and in particular that preserving slavery against Northern attempts to diminish it was the reason the Confederacy had seceded in the first place. The seceding states all said as much explicitly in their declarations of secession, which were widely published and disseminated among the Confederate civilian and military population.

Southern whites had a strong vested interest in the perpetuation of slavery as a foundation of their culture, because it gave them a) an explicit position in the social hierarchy that was above blacks, and b) was a possibility to which they could aspire economically. Even if they didn't own slaves, they were still better than slaves because they were free, and they could still treat slaves more poorly than they could fellow whites because slaves lacked rights. This was commonly understood and fairly deeply ingrained throughout Southern culture, which is everyone from merchants (exploiting cheap labor without compensation) to politicians (benefiting from the additional 60% boost in federal representation for the slave population granted by the Constitution) to religious leaders (preaching the Biblical justifications of slavery) throughout the South supporting the institution.

The "common man" was often fighting out of patriotism (both Northern and Southern soldiers write often about the feeling of national pride that compelled them to enlist), but also because of conscription. In either case, though, it's important to remember what that patriotism was founded in, and what conscripted soldiers thought they were being conscripted for. In the North, soldiers generally felt at the beginning that preserving the Union was the major reason they should fight, but the North had been radicalizing toward abolition through the 1850s, and by the middle of the war emancipation was an explicitly accepted and agreed-with goal for most Northern troops. Conscripts would have understood these causes as well, because they would have read what their governments told them.

Southern patriotism wasn't concerned with "regional pride" in the abstract, but with what Southern culture was - namely, an apartheid state based in the subjugation of blacks as a race. If Southerners were fighting for pride, that was what they were proud of. There wasn't really a "trick" insofar as the centrality of slavery is concerned, although we can have a question about whether poor Southern whites weren't better off after emancipation anyway because it robbed the plantation barons of their primary source of wealth (which was re-constituted anyway under Jim Crow sharecropping).

I highly recommend the book What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning. From the book's description: "Manning ignores the writings of elites and emphasizes the opinions of common soldiers, North and South, white and black. [. . .] Although acknowledging that many Union soldiers enlisted to preserve the Union rather than to fight slavery, she asserts that both slavery and emancipation were constant topics of discussion as early as 1861. She disputes that nonslaveholding Confederate soldiers (who were the overwhelming majority) fought primarily to defend hearth and home from Yankee invaders. Rather, she maintains that the defense of slavery was intimately tied to their sense of manhood, honor, and their place in the Southern social structures." She pretty conclusively demonstrates that both North and South understood that they were fighting because of slavery, and that Southern soldiers believed that defending the slavery system was vital to their own self-interest.

As for the subject of respecting the soldiers who fought the war, I'm not particularly concerned. We can honor our ancestors without glorifying them, and monuments to Confederate soldiers end up implying that the cause of the conflict was worth honoring as much as the individuals. Bravery is cheap; when there are more monuments to Southern Unionists (of which there were many, almost never honored with monuments in the South today) or abolitionists (who risked everything for their ideals in a hostile region) or the slaves themselves (who are more deserving of honor than anyone), then perhaps it will be worth erecting a few for the Confederate soldiers who died fighting to preserve slavery.