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.
At the time of Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson's appointment in 1991, the US Senate was in Democrat control and the old confederate states were represented there by 14 Democrats.
Heflin, Shelby -AL, Bumpers, Pryor -AR, Graham -FL, Nunn -GA, Johnston, Breaux -LA, Ford -KY, Sasser, Mathews -TN Hollings -SC, Robb -VA, Byrd -WV
Does it seem unreasonable that one or more of these southern Democrats would have been able to block (within their own caucus) the appointment of a "marxist historian" to the Civil War Sites Advisory Comission?
Sure, but they didn't. Either they didn't look past his paper and didn't realize he was a Marxist, or they voted for him because they owed someone a favor. The people likely to have nominated a Marxist scholar like McPherson were not Southerners, was my point.
To buy at home or abroad the the goods the army needed was one thing; to move them to the places where the army wanted them was quite another. Lacking a financial and industrial system equal to the demands of a large war, the South lacked also a proper transportation system. It had many railroads but no real railroad network, because hardly any of its railroads had been built with through traffic in mind.
Most of them had been conceived of as feeder lines, to move cotton to the wharves at river towns or at seaports...this handicap, to be sure, existed also in the north, but there it was not so serious. It had been recognized earlier, and it was being removed; and the significant point was that in the North it -could- be removed, and in the South, it could not.
The South was almost helpless in this respect. Nearly all its locomotives, spikes, car wheels, car bodies and other items of equipment had come from the north...
As the nation's need for an adequate transportation increased, the system wuld grow weaker and weaker, and there was no earthly help for it....these problems , indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely towards final defeat that one is faced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom they were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who who were familiar with valor, the classics and heroric atttitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.
The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously.
--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton
"Alone in the south, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-hoding city boosted the Union's powerful advantage....In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to the Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."
--The South vs. TheSouth, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling
Walt
A parlor pink is a term from the 1930's and later.
A real dedicated "Red" would be off to the barricades, say in the Spanish Civil War. A "Pink" -- like you, apparently -- talks a good game but stays close to home and lets someone else do his fighting.
It's easy for you to abhor force when as many as 200,000 U.S. servicemen are moving into position to protect you from the people that put a bullet in your brain as soon as look at you.
Walt
You don't have to; as long as you don't act on such convictions, you'll be alright.
Walt
That puts me in company with Washington, Madison and Hamilton. That's pretty good company.
Walt
Odysseus was "the ever-patient man."
Look at it this way. The rebel states were doing to the Constitution what they planned for the faithful Penelope.
Walt
So slaves shouldn't be freed?
Walt
- - - "All these deaths of U.S. citizens --the death of EVERY U.S. citizen killed by Arab terror in the United States, can be laid directly at the feet of George Bush I." - WhiskeyPapa, 11/15/02
SOURCE:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=452#448
Found this:
"Among those instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war was Donald Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Saddam as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of America's involvement with Saddam in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait - which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors - is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend." Throughout the 1980s, Saddam's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Jordan - a Middle East version of the Communist "domino theory." That was enough to turn Saddam into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to refer routinely to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, depicted as "the bad guys."
Now, I will ask you:
Why do you think after all this U.S. aid, did Saddam Hussein try and assassinate George Bush Sr. in 1993?
Walt
Never met a tyrant you couldn't love, did you, Wlat? I never thought I'd see someone justifying Saddam in the threads of FreeRepublic.
That's a new one on me. But yes, the U.S. had to perform a volte-face on Mexican territorial integrity, which had been the previous U.S. policy position. People like John Quincy Adams opposed Polk's war for reasons of both principle and politics, and wrapped the latter in the former. They just didn't like Southern crackerheads, is my take, and tilted against them in everything behind a pretense of scrupulous application of principle.
Good point. Whigs and Republicans thunderously denounced the Ostend Manifesto on principle -- and then applied it to the South, with artillery.
[Wlat, changing subject again] So slaves shouldn't be freed?
Nonresponsive. Fallacy of distraction.
The protagonist of Lincoln hides behind obliquity to call me a coward. But you're tough on flies, aren't you, Wlat?
Come on, friend, you want to call me names, call me names. See if any of it sticks. I'll hold up my end.
Cowardice. Now that's a pretty strong accusation. Real strong, and real insupportable.... You wouldn't be baiting me, would you, Wlat? You dying to call in the AM's? Your finger hovering over the "abuse" button, boy?
Bite me, Wlat.
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