I don't think it'll stop any sooner than the obsession with the Civil War - which continues b/c most southern kids high school history classes spend so much time focusing on it that they rarely get to JFK, let alone Nixon, Watergate, Reagan and Star Wars, Clinton, etc. Even my college history class - which I specifically took "reconstruction through present day" spent over half of our class time ON reconstruction and the rest on the two World Wars. When you educate your children in ignorance, they are bound to stay that way.

I did take an interesting class though, in which we discussed a magazine title "Us and Them" detailing various hate crimes through out American history - including the KKK, the treatment of the Chinese in the Western US, the Irish up North and the Jewish people everywhere - point being, is that Southern schools, bless them, need to grow up and treat the Civil War and Slavery as a thing of the distant past - like it is - and focus on more recent developments like the Civil Rights Movement, and Women's Suffrage - focusing on these may help the next generation see with more well-opened and informed eyes.