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.
I've visted several Civil War battlefields, from Pennsylvania to Arkansas. The Park Service generally has left the politics out of their materials and monuments, and concentrated on the military history of the place.
At Gettysburg, the political element enters because Lincoln chose that place and that moment to articulate his new theory of government and his new theme for why the war should be persevered in.
The idea that we are supposed to rejoice over the dead because they were wrong and bad, as determined by today's politicians ex post facto, is Orwellian in its creepiness and its repugnance.