If you'd like to understand the history of the USA, here's one for you: Buster Keaton's "The General" is now regarded as his best film, containing truly astonishing stunts and sequences

Here's the quick version if you just have five minutes: if he misses the timing with that railroad tie the train he is on will probably go off the track

The film is based on a real event during the Civil War: the "Great Locomotive Chase," when some Union volunteers steal a Confederate train and try to mess up as much as they can as they try to reach Union territory

But the Lost Cause ideology was so powerful and pervasive in 1926 that they flipped the story and made the Confederates the heroes: Keaton thought that the public would not accept Union soldiers as good protagonists

I haven't had a chance to read it yet and have no idea if this example is in the book, but this is the sort of thing that @HC_Richardson is describing in "How the South Won the Civil War" https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-the-south-won-the-civil-war-9780190900908?cc=ca&lang=en&