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 Monument is renowned for its fossils but instead of protecting and exploring the principal resource, they spend our tax money promoting the idea that men were not needed in settling the West.
One sad fact is that most Americans can't even tell you in what century the Civil War occurred. "Structured forgetting and wishful thinking" pretty much describes what is going on in our school systems concerning U.S. History in general. And why must everything be couched in terms of "its meaning for contemporary society"? This is a filter which does much harm to the teaching of history, no matter what your point of view about the events in question.
BTW one of my ancestors served in the First Florida. A cousin still has the signed oath which he had to take in order to vote. I am going on memory but I think he was originally in the 6th Fla. then later merged into the First.
The "war" (i.e., the conflict between the government of the United States and the secessionist states) was fought over slavery, albeit indirectly (the U.S.A. fought to preserve/restore the union; the south seceeded over the abolishonist Lincoln's rise to prominence). The south did seceed to preserve slavery, however, the north did not fight to "Free the slaves".
Those who fought the war, did not fight the war over slavery. Very few people in the south actually owned slaves, and those who did were not the rank and file solders (a few were generals).
If the NPS wants "accuracy" in how the battlefields are portrayed, then they must provide the same accuracy over protraying the war crimes the United States inflicted on its own people (realize the view of the USA was that the secession was illegal, and the states still belonged to the union, despite their rouge governments). Sherman's utter destruction of many civilians lives, properties, and communities is an example. Sherman was not court martialled for this. Many officers since have been court martialled for less. Sherman was a war hero, but he was also a war criminal. But in San Francisco, they have an elementary school named after him.
The NPS must also point out the reconstruction era, where the citizens of the southern states did not enjoy the same constitutional rights of those in the rest of the USA.
I am not one of these people who relives the confederacy. I think the right side won. However, the whole truth is the only truth.
Of course, the breeding and trading of slaves was allowed in the confederate states.
Shermans directive was to "destroy the railroads to shut off supplies and break their will to fight". His method was not discouraged nor frowned upon. War is Hell.
So you are going to make up a story? Tell it to someone else.
A common misconception. The confederate constitution actually protected slave imports, albeit only from the slave-owning parts of the United States.
I visited the Gettysburg battlefield a couple of years ago, and I didn't notice a particularly pro-Southern slant to the presentations. I happen not to believe any of these propositions of the Lost Cause ideology, except possibly the second. So I think I would remember if any of them had been pressed on me, and I do not remember any of them.
I visited the Harpers Ferry site around the same time, and I remember thinking how the site did what I thought was a good job of presenting the arguments both for and against John Brown.
Interesting that the Bush administration would ideologize these matters to an extent the Clinton administration did not do.
The Southern armies might have won a guerilla war, but marching en masse to battlefields against an opponent with three times your population is a sure way to lose.
I predict that wihtin 10 years the relief on Stone Mountain depicting Lee, Davis, and Jackson will be destroyed by "the officials."
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