Posted on 12/22/2002 7:56:45 AM PST by GeneD
GETTYSBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - The U.S. National Park Service has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery.
Nowhere is the project more striking than at Gettysburg, site of the largest battle ever fought on American soil, where plans are going ahead to build a new visitors center and museum at a cost of $95 million that will completely change the way the conflict is presented to visitors.
"For the past 100 years, we've been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here," said Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar.
"We want to change the perception so that Gettysburg becomes known internationally as the place of a 'new rebirth of freedom,"' he said, quoting President Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" made on Nov. 19, 1863, five months after the battle.
"We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another," Latschar said.
The project seems particularly relevant following the furor over Republican Sen. Trent Lott's recent remarks seeming to endorse racial segregation, which forced many Americans to revisit one of the uglier chapters of the nation's history.
When it opens in 2006, the new museum will offer visitors a narrative of the entire Civil War, putting the battle into its larger historical context. Latschar said he was inspired by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., which sets out to tell a story rather than to display historical artifacts behind glass cases.
"Our current museum is absolutely abysmal. It tells no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason," Latschar said.
It is also failing to preserve the 700,000 items in its collection, including 350,000 maps, documents and photographs, many of which were rotting away or crumbling into dust until they were put into temporary storage.
FEW BLACKS VISIT
Around 1.8 million people visit Gettysburg every year. Latschar said a disproportionate number were men and the park attracts very few black visitors.
In 1998, he invited three prominent historians to examine the site. Their conclusion: that Gettysburg's interpretive programs had a "pervasive southern sympathy."
The same was true at most if not all of the 28 Civil War sites operated by the National Parks Service. A report to Congress delivered in March 2000 found that only nine did an adequate job of addressing slavery in their exhibits.
Another six, including Gettysburg, gave it a cursory mention. The rest did not mention it at all. Most parks are now trying to correct the situation.
Park rangers and licensed guides at Gettysburg and other sites have already changed their presentations in line with the new policy. Now, park authorities are taking a look at brochures, handouts and roadside signs.
According to Dwight Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service, the South had tremendous success in promoting its "lost cause" theory.
The theory rested on three propositions: that the war was fought over "states' rights" and not over slavery; that there was no dishonor in defeat since the Confederacy lost only because it was overwhelmed by the richer north; and that slavery was a benign institution and most slaves were content with their lot and faithful to their masters.
"Much of the public conversation today about the Civil War and its meaning for contemporary society is shaped by structured forgetting and wishful thinking" he said.
There was no secession. There was attempted secession.
Walt
Most Southern soldiers felt they were fighting because the Union would not let them have their "divorce."
I read this post to me after I wrote my Post 98.
It seems we are on the same wavelength.
Poor whites were fighting for white supremacy.
Walt
Call it whatever you like. It won't change the fact that it happened, or that your false god spent 4 years of bloody conquest trying to counteract its effects.
No it didn't.....WhiskeyPapa
Ummmmm.....Walt.....My point is that fifty-something year old politicians picked a fight and then hundreds of thousands of teenaged boys and twenty-something year old men ended up having to settle the matter on the battlefield.
What do you mean, "No, it didn't"?
History is a lie.
History is the LATEST lie.
Walt's false god, Abraham Lincoln. It has been my experience that Walt, aka WhiskeyPapa, is incapable to admit or recognize any error or flaw on the part of Lincoln and often treats him as a secular deity rather than an historical figure. Therefore it is my contention that Lincoln is his false god.
Gettysburg Address, A. Lincoln (1863)
This however, is ridiculous.
It's about making happy a bunch of liberal college professors eager to deconstruct the Civil War.
Mentioning slavery is fine. But we have always emphasized the soldier's tale at Civil War battlefield memorials out of respect for the sacrifices made - by both sides.
If I had my way a whole lot of leftist Federal poobahs would be fired and turned out onto the street to beg for their supper
A mention is fine, but the Civil War was not about slavery. Any such relationship both then and now today is mostly an afterthought, and a simplified easy-to-understand northern after the fact justification.
Thanks for filling in the blanks on who these characters were. Lefty types, naturally.
Not that there was ever any doubt...
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