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Antebellum is a Latin word meaning "before war" (ante means before and bellum means war). In United States history and historiography, the term antebellum is often used to refer to the period of increasing sectionalism leading to the American Civil War, instead of the term "pre-Civil War". In that context, the Antebellum Period is often considered to have begun with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, although sometimes it is defined as extending back as early as 1812. The time period after the Civil War is called the postbellum or reconstruction era.

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...

— From the opening of the film Gone with the Wind (1939)

The Industrial Revolution is mythically substituted for by the widespread destruction of Sherman's March to the Sea from Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean and by the military occupation of the defeated Confederacy by Union forces during the period termed Reconstruction implemented in Florida, Tennessee, or the Trans-Mississippi states.

More than any other single American artifact, Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind and the subsequent 1939 film, have permanently altered historical perspective and fixed a slanted popularized image of pre-Civil War American history and are good examples of the romanticized view. In the romanticized view, the Antebellum Period is often looked back on with sentimental nostalgia by some whites in the U.S. South, as an idealized pre-industrial highly-structured genteel and stable agrarian society, in contrast to the anxiety and struggle of modern life. The issue of slavery is largely ignored in Gone with the Wind — although Mitchell does make a point of examining the relationship between the slaves and their masters on the southern plantations. D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, romanticized the pre-war South in a very similar way.

Because of slavery, and the many human rights abuses it spawned, many African Americans find the romanticizing of this era to be offensive, and often see a coded reference of approval of the racism of the period in the term "Old South".

The term antebellum is also used to describe the architecture of the pre-war South. Many Southern plantation houses use this style, including:

• Boone Hall
• The Hermitage
• Longwood (Natchez, Mississippi)
• Middleton Place
• Belle Meade Plantation
• Carnton Plantation
• Waveland Plantation
• Rippavilla
• Rattle & Snap Plantation
• Tara Plantation (Fictional, From Gone with the Wind)

• History of the United States (1789-1849)
• History of the United States (1849-1865)
• Origins of the American Civil War

• Antebellum Slavery (PBS)
• Aspects of the Antebellum Christmas
• Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Antebellum American History, 1814-1864 University of Colorado.