Anthony Conwright, in a guest essay for The New York Times Opinion section (gift link):

Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

I don’t recall ever learning anything other than “Civil War,” and, as an historic alternative, “War Between the States.” Definitely not “the Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” despite having learned that it was a war over slavery. There was also the “War of Northern Aggression,” but those of us growing up outside the South always recognized the obvious revisionism. Little did I know that “Civil War” is its own “linguistic whitewashing.”