The Civil War got its hooks into me back in the early 90s. Nothing I learned about it in school had any sort of effect before that. It was just names and monuments that birds always seemed to shit on. Memorizing the Gettysburg Address and knowing that Lincoln freed the slaves and then you turned the page and they had suddenly moved on to WWII. It was treated more like a quaint historical speed bump than the cataclysm it was, and remains.