More than eight decades after it was released, 1939’s Gone with the Wind remains, adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing movie of all time. The film and the 1936 Margaret Mitchell novel on which it’s based continue dominate American pop-culture memory of the Civil War — and a new book takes a deeper look at why that’s the case, and why it matters. Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War, spoke to TIME about who steered American memory of the war in its immediate aftermath, why Gone With the Wind is so popular and which other stories of the war should be better known. Your work looks at the stories that have shaped American memory of the Civil War.