The Thirteenth Amendment, one of the three reconstruction amendments created in the aftermath of the Civil War, was adopted 152 years ago this week. That fact was not lost on Mick Chantler, a historian from Sonoma and an authority on the War of the Rebellion, Honest Abe and baseball. Next month he will teach a class for seniors at the Dance Palace titled “Reconstruction and Recovery: the Post-Civil War South.” The lecture series, offered through Dominican University, explores topics such as an ill-prepared Andrew Johnson following the assassination of his predecessor, carpetbaggers, the Scopes Trial and the persistence of racism. “Mississippi didn’t ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until about 20 years ago,” he said. “The fact that they held out that long is a symbolic statement, a screw-you to Yankee northern liberals. ‘We’re going to stay the same!’” Mr. Chantler is a longtime educator who ran the career center at Sonoma Valley High School for decades and now teaches through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a program supported by the Bernard Osher Foundation that encourages adults to explore new areas of knowledge without the stress of examinations and grades. He’s taught a class at the Dance Palace—one of OLLI’s various satellite locations throughout the Bay Area—for the last five years, beginning with Abraham Lincoln and later exploring the pre-war South. He returns on Jan. 12 for an eight-week breakdown on how Southerners continued their cultural-prejudice agenda but replaced battlefields with crafty legislation. He calls the Civil War the “central experience in American history” and argues that we’re still dealing with it over 150 years later. “There really is a reason, and it’s a good one, for why people are so angry over these confederate monuments,” he said. “It’s not a case of political correctness run amok. Trump is not an accident; he grew out of what much of the country was thinking. These monuments point to something bigger and the fact Trump came out in support of them speaks volumes. That’s where half the county’s mind was at all along.” The second half of the 19th century is a period people often skip over, an otherwise gilded age characterized by Northern apathy and a misrepresentation of the past. His goal for the series is to help students better understand modern controversies. “I went to college in the 1960s,” he said. “My teachers received an education in an earlier period of time when, in a strange way, Southerners were seen as the heroes. For instance, ‘Gone with The Wind.’ Who is the hero in that movie? The rebels are made out to be brave!” Mr. Chantler is already looking ahead to crafting a class that zeroes in on the modern South while referencing contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick. He’s taught hundreds in OLLI courses at Dominican and Berkeley, but said there’s a certain charm in his West Marin audience. “It’s really nice to teach to a smaller group because there is an opportunity to have a dialogue with the students,” he said. “Out there, you can have that and it’s a different kind of teaching experience. And the people are so nice.”