During the summer of 2013, more than two dozen visual, literary, and musical artists from Columbia, South Carolina gathered on multiple occasions with four historical experts to learn as much as they could about a night almost 150 years earlier when General William Tecumseh Sherman and his army invaded and burned their city, an episode that would eventually lead to the end of America's Civil War. There were no war reenactors among them, no Lost Cause mythologists or closet racists. There were no conservatives. In fact, the members of the group were not only artists but die-hard intellectuals...