attackfish

We tend to use Hollywood to refer to the entire mythmaking apparatus, because it was so good at synthesizing and codifying tropes used elsewhere. While the glorious lost cause was common in literature and penny dreadfuls, and a sort of Southern consciousness, when westerns became big business in Hollywood, they picked up the trope and gave it the kind of staying power that it needed to just be considered an accepted part of the western genre. The US is still heavily divided by the memory of the civil war. If not for Hollywood, the trope never would have made it in the old Union.

That was the other reason I couldn't deal with the browncoats. If the government was as awful as they said, why weren't they all in a secret prison somewhere?