He shows how defeated societies come to question their identities, rewrite their histories, and often strive to emulate the victors: the American South to become a better North; the French to militarize along Prussian lines; and the Germans to seek regeneration by adopting the American model. He charts the losers' paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their past and explain their defeat: the nostalgic plantation legend after the collapse of the Confederacy; the new cult of Joan of Arc in France; and Germany's myth of having been stabbed in the back by foreign elements.