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.
The socialists have control of the schools, I don't know if it's possible to get it back and the damage has already been done to a generation of our youth.
SSSSHhhhhhh....they're busy changing history here - now be quiet.
Haven't they been doing this for many moons?
For any of a number of reasons, some of them ideological, but as many economic, historical, and religious. The South had been settled in colonial times by a different religious culture than the North. The latter's agrarian culture diverged increasingly from the North's industrialized urban ethic. And the feudal aristocracy that pervaded the antebellum South established a caste system that chafed on the egalitarian sensibilities of the North.
The Southern system was supported on slavery simply out of economic necessity. But it is a gross oversimplification to attribute all differences between the two regions to slavery alone.
It was a bitter winter battle, blood was mixed above ground and below; won't anyone let it rest?
At the beginning of Secession the contemporary slave-holdings were legal under law. As usual, the crux of contention was future holdings and changing attitudes made rancorous by economis and political maneuvering in D.C.
The war was fought over the "Territories", nothing more, nothing less; the North won, the Indians paid the price and the West was won.
You can put an end to all this merely by providing some evidence that slaves were used to staff the White House. What do you base your claim on?
Which is why I didn't.
A much larger issue is human greed as feed by cheap labor.
Perhaps in the Marxist world where everything is defined in terms of class struggle. But not as a particularly relevant factor in the American Civil War.
I'm pretty sure the move for all of this started under Clintoon. The people behing this are probably holdovers.
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."
Do you see this claim as true? I've visited a half-dozen or so battlefields including Gettysburg and thought the presentations factual with no particular bias. I'm interested in your view.
LOL. Should read "new rebirth of freedom = death of the Republic and birth of the Empire"
Give these d#mn leftist followers of Sandburg, Dubois, and McPherson another twenty years and the Confederacy will have never existed in the first place!! The Founders meant for the national government to take care of you from cradle to grave, no decisions to be made at the state level, and all your money that's printed unconstitutionally belongs to them. Yeah, that's it!! < /sarcasm>
A biblical scholar from Penn State believes there is a liberal/conservative schism in all religions worldwide that is breaking down along North/South lines with the conservatives in the south and the liberals in the north. He claims it's true of all major religions and affects all continents. One example is the Catholic and Christian churches in Africa and South America as opposed to Europe and northern North America.
Actually, they're taking a Marxist line now, led by James McPherson.
Democratic politics revolves around demonizing the South, in order to pick off Republican-leaning, conservative constituencies in the Upper Midwest and New England, thus recreating the divisions of the Civil War. These historians are undertaking this new round of revisionism as a service to the Democratic Party.
And Latschar was appointed in 1993 by Bill Clinton, and is a Clintonoid spawn that should have been broomed out in five minutes by Mr. Bush. -- "But that would be partisaaan", the journopolemicists of the Media Left would wail, overlooking the fact that Clinton fired every one of the United States Attorneys as one of his very first acts in office. (Of course, one of them was looking pretty hard at a little S&L scandal called Madison Guaranty......)
This new movement represents a politicization of the National Park Service. Of course, the Clintons worked on politicizing all the great agencies one way or another (affirmative action is the best example, and creating internal bureaucracies that basically functioned as political organs within bureaus whose employees were all Civil Service). But his political agenda with respect to the factionalization of the Park Service was the propagation of the Marxist, vanguardist model of society and government.
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