This article is based on materials collected by the author over many years in 28 cities and towns in 14 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. He aims to show how the historical (aka cultural or social) memory of the Civil War (War of the North and the South) from 1861 through 1865, and the corresponding abolition of slavery become a factor in the anti-racist movement that has swept the country again in recent years. Attention is drawn to transformations in the Civil War memory associated with changing perceptions of the history, essence, and sociocultural boundaries of the American nation. The essence of these changes is the affirmation of a view of the U.S. nation as the entity that includes both whites and blacks on an equal footing. It has also changed the perception of the Civil War as a key moment in the formation of the American nation: whereas previously the War of the North and the South was seen as a war between Northern whites and Southern whites, it has increasingly emphasized the active role of black Americans. At the same time, the differences in the historical memory of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery that persist in the North and the South allow the author to argue that the sociocultural division of U.S. society into Northerners and Southerners has not disappeared to this day. The article also highlights that not just racial dichotomies, but racial inequalities were embedded in the very foundation of the American nation at the time of its formation. This fact raises the question of whether so-called systemic (otherwise structural, institutional, or social) racism is in principle eradicable in the United States, despite the obvious change for the better in the black community since the victory of the black civil rights movement of 1954–1968.

Colonial rule did not eradicate the key social and political institutions of indigenous societies. Their continued existence, although often in forms substantially transformed since the precolonial period, still plays a major role in shaping the specific trajectories of nation-building in postcolonial states. Among these institutions are the so-called traditional rulers. During the first decades following decolonization, governments in many postcolonial countries sought to deprive "indigenous rulers" of political authority as part of broader attempts to overcome ethnicity in the name of nation-building. Yet "indigenous authorities" proved remarkably resilient. Their endurance was rooted not only, or even primarily, in their practical effectiveness under modern conditions, but in the persistent legitimacy they retained in the public consciousness. At the same time, the postcolonial states of Africa, Asia, and Oceania have witnessed neither a straightforward restoration nor simple preservation of precolonial indigenous political institutions. Rather, these institutions have undergone further transformation, driven by the fundamental fact that, as in the colonial period, they no longer represent sovereign polities but are incorporated into modern — and postmodern — state structures. By the 1990s, it had become evident that a more realistic and effective approach was not to await the disappearance of "chiefs" and "kings", nor to exclude them from postcolonial political systems as collaborators of colonial powers or as obsolete symbols of backwardness. Instead, the prevailing tendency was to integrate them into those systems, encourage the bureaucratization of "indigenous" institutions, and redirect them toward "modern" national objectives, while continuing to concentrate substantive political power in the institutions of the nation-state. Such integration, in turn, offered a means of overcoming tribalism as an obstacle to nation-building. Tribalism becomes an impediment to nation-building only where, owing to a lack of historical preconditions and deliberate policies on the part of "modern authorities", "indigenous authorities" have not been effectively incorporated into the political system of the postcolonial state. The continued existence of indigenous political institutions, therefore, does not in itself constitute a threat to the formation of a postcolonial nation-state.