Newswise — Days before the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the public should not shy away from asking difficult questions about the past, because difficult questions are what make history relevant today, says Peter Carmichael, Director of the Civil War Institute and Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College.
“[There] are timeless questions about what it means to be a nation at war. How soldiers cope with the trauma of combat, how poverty shapes the military experience, and how acts of mourning influence political loyalties are inquiries that make history engaging and relevant,” he said, noting that much of what we learn about the past can inform our current situation.
Carmichael cited an example of a timeless story from the Civil War, “One of the thousands of Southerners scattered in shallow graves across the Gettysburg battlefield was North Carolinian Charles Futch, shot in the head while fighting next to his sibling John, who never left his dying brother’s side. After burying him in an anonymous grave, a semi-literate John poured out his tortured feelings in a letter home. ‘Charly got kild and he suffered [a] gratdeal,’ he wrote, ‘[and] I don’t want nothing to eat hardly forIam...sick all the time and half crazy. I never wanted to come home so bad in my life.’”
The funding crisis in Washington “should not prevent historians from asking the public to consider the methods of fighting, the treatment of veterans, the plight of refugees, and the politics of warfare from the Civil War to today,” Carmichael continued.
“Journalists, for instance, report that drone strikes can create more enemies than they eliminate, just as the Federal shelling of Petersburg and Atlanta strengthened Confederate loyalties for many white Southerners. Here is just one example as to how the public can consider contemporary issues through the portal of the Civil War.”
Carmichael notes that it will take “bold teaching, both in the classroom and at historic sites, to create a civic space where people feel free to exchange opposing ideas about the past and today.”
While Carmichael believes that the current Sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War has overcome the Centennial’s failure to deal with the difficult and divisive issues of race and slavery, he feels that we may be “leaving our own distinct legacy of omission if we allow Americans to retreat into a fantasy world in which war becomes a spectator sport.” He says, “In contemplating our Civil War history, we need to find ways to awaken Americans to their civic responsibilities to both the nation and the world, as the United States confronts a dark and quite possibly an inescapable future of unending global conflict.”
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