This article will appear in the October 2020 issue of Civil War Times which will be on newsstands in mid-September. Get yours at Barnes and Noble, Walmart, and online at our company site.
HistoryNet "Visiting Gettysburg National Military Park should be unsettling. The site exists, after all, because of a breathtaking failure of the nation’s electoral system in 1860. Powerful members of Southern society thought Republican victory menaced the long-term viability of slavery and refused to accept the verdict of the ballot box. They dismembered the republic and opened the way for a war whose memory grappled with massive human loss, emancipation’s vast political and social consequences, and anger that lingered for years. As the nation continues to struggle with that memory, a sound understanding of the war and its legacies demands a level of discomfort. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg will upset some visitors, but that is a price worth paying to protect a valuable and instructive memorial landscape.
"The need to accept discomfort merits attention because heated debates regarding the Civil War’s memorial landscape have included calls to remove Confederate monuments at Gettysburg. These debates on social media, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and elsewhere raise the question of how best to handle the conflict’s deeply, and sometimes violently, contested memory. No other era in our history features the unfathomable complexity of political, social, and constitutional fracturing that sundered the republic and unleashed frightful slaughter. Through 12 years of Reconstruction, decades of Jim Crow rule in the South, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th Century, and beyond, conflicting memories of the Civil War affected national politics and culture."
HistoryNet "Visiting Gettysburg National Military Park should be unsettling. The site exists, after all, because of a breathtaking failure of the nation’s electoral system in 1860. Powerful members of Southern society thought Republican victory menaced the long-term viability of slavery and refused to accept the verdict of the ballot box. They dismembered the republic and opened the way for a war whose memory grappled with massive human loss, emancipation’s vast political and social consequences, and anger that lingered for years. As the nation continues to struggle with that memory, a sound understanding of the war and its legacies demands a level of discomfort. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg will upset some visitors, but that is a price worth paying to protect a valuable and instructive memorial landscape.
"The need to accept discomfort merits attention because heated debates regarding the Civil War’s memorial landscape have included calls to remove Confederate monuments at Gettysburg. These debates on social media, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and elsewhere raise the question of how best to handle the conflict’s deeply, and sometimes violently, contested memory. No other era in our history features the unfathomable complexity of political, social, and constitutional fracturing that sundered the republic and unleashed frightful slaughter. Through 12 years of Reconstruction, decades of Jim Crow rule in the South, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th Century, and beyond, conflicting memories of the Civil War affected national politics and culture."
Tourist attraction: President Harry Truman offers his view of the Battle of Gettysburg
to reporters from the base of the Virginia Memorial. (Courtesy of The Adams County Historical Society)
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| The Bloody Angle: Picketts Charge on day 3 |
"Gettysburg National Military Park offers superb opportunities to study how the war has been remembered. The battlefield yields insights into memory traditions developed by both the war’s winners and losers. Because most Americans have little or no appreciation for the difference between history and memory, between what actually happened, and how events have been interpreted by different groups at different times, the memorials at Gettysburg hold substantial value as educational tools. As part of this commemorative landscape, which developed over more than a century and a quarter and retains great historical integrity, Confederate monuments should be woven into a touring narrative devoted to how Americans have recalled their defining national trauma. The addition of contextual waysides would enhance the quality of the educational experience by helping visitors recognize ideas and themes associated with various streams of memory." . . .
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