I recently spent two weeks in my favorite place on earth, St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. While reading a locally published magazine I was shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that I was apparently lied to as a child attending Pennsylvania public schools. Having played Little League baseball at Thaddeus Stevens Middle School, I was also taught the standard "history" of how enlightened Northerners from Pennsylvania and elsewhere died by the hundreds of thousands during the early 1860s solely because of their deep and compassionate concern for the plight o the black slaves in the southern states. There was never any self interest on display, political, economic, or otherwise, only compassion and self sacrifice for the benefit of black strangers in "the deep south."

This Yankees-are-Saints/All Southerners are Devils story was taught to generations of Pennsylvanians like myself, in both American history and Pennsylvania history classes. Such was life in the Deep North.

Imagine my state of disbelief when I read in the St. John magazine that when the U.S. government purchased the islands from Denmark (in 1917) the military imposed strict racial segregation throughout the islands, which the natives considered to be much more demeaning than the mere racism of the Danes. What's next? Will we learn that Abe Linocoln was a typical, run-of-the-mill politician and not the saintly, self-sacrificing, suffering, brooding, Jesus-like figure with the moral stature of 10,000 Mother Theresas we've all be taught about?