Some recent articles that have crossed my path in the last week, focusing on U.S. and military history:
-This first one is from George F. Will at the Washington Post, and looks at the newly opened museum and visitor center at Gettysburg. Will highlights the important need for public history today:
Ours would be a better nation if boys and girls of all regions, and particularly the many high school and even college graduates who cannot place the Civil War in the correct half-century, could be moved, as large numbers of Americans used to be, by the names of Gettysburg battlefield sites, such as Devil's Den, the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Culp's Hill and Little Round Top, instead of being like the visitor here who said it is amazing that so many great battles, such as Antietam and Chickamauga and Shiloh, occurred on Park Service land; and another visitor who doubted that the fighting here really was fierce because there are no bullet marks on the monuments.
-This next article is about the mystery that has surrounded the sinking of the Confederate submarine, the H.L. Hunley. We were actually just discussing the naval battles of the Civil War in one of the courses I'm taking this semester, so this article had a particular relevance for me.
-Finally, this article about America's final surviving WWI veteran was sent to me by Brad V. of Letters in Bottles. Frank Woodruff, who is 107, didn't see much action during WWI, but he did spend 39 months in a prison camp during WWII, after he was taken prisoner while conducting business in the Philippines.
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2 comments:
Wow. The comments in the Will piece are absolutely dumbfounding.
I had to read those comments by the visitors twice, because I couldn't believe they were said by real people.
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