Ms. Shelley's theory, however, has largely been discarded for reasons that will become apparent presently. Today, the main devotees of the theory all live together in a small tent in the Arizona desert, where they worship a semi-deity name Bob, who, they believe, chooses to manifest himself in the form of a small Chihuahua. In the nineteenth century, the world saw the rise of the United States from a rag-tag collection of thirteen disparate colonies to a group of a number bigger than thirteen. In order to demonstrate just how big and impressive it was, the United States chose not to be so united and to kill off a hundred thousand or so men, women, and horses in order to demonstrate an astonishing grasp of the oxymoron. I refer, of course, to the Civil War.
Many people foolishly believe that slavery was the cause of the war.
A few, more enlightened folks are of the theory that the war was actually caused by intense inter-state rivalries and the AFC's astonishing inability to win the Super Bowl. Some even more enlightened folks are of the opinion that the oxymoron was caused by extreme differences in manners of production in the North and South and of the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, in which the Court made a royal ass of itself, or, in the alternative, a nasty case of the sniffles that escalated into a war. If we are to judge history, though, we must look to the historians active during and shortly after an event. In volume five of a book written by an historian whose name, surprisingly, is not Bob, we find a fascinating account. This tome can be found at the library of Yankton College, which library is reputed to be sinking because the architects neglected to account for the weight of the books, but which library is in fact sinking only because it's bored and seeking attention.