Historian Lucy Worsley examines how the American Civil War has been remembered rather than how it happened. At the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC she questions the tidy story of Abraham Lincoln as the selfless liberator, weighing his personal views on race against how his own troops treated African Americans. In the South she traces how postwar memory was deliberately reshaped, from D.W. Griffith's 1915 film that helped relaunch the Ku Klux Klan to Gone with the Wind's plantation romance filmed in Scarlett O'Hara's Georgia countryside. A Washington historian connects Martin Luther King's 1963 speech on the Lincoln Memorial steps, invoking a broken financial promise to Black Americans, to that same unfinished reckoning. The film closes in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Worsley talks to residents on opposite sides of the fight over a Robert E. Lee statue, the same monument that drew Confederate flags and Klan costumes into a fatal 2017 rally. Interviews with historians and location filming throughout make the case that the war's arguments never really stopped.