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Stumpage Reports
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Wednesday, July 23, 2003 :::
Inevitable, Shmevitable: or, What? Another Book About Gettysburg?!
Okay, that Shakespeare post sucked. I'll make up for it by rambling about the Civil War.
Several of my history professors repeatedly reminded us that while the past is past and done, events were not pre-ordained or inevitable before they happened. This gives you a chance to understand decisions people made at the time, based on the information they had at that moment. My Civil War teacher frequently reminded us that people in the 1850's did not know they lived in "antebellum" times. He also told us the majority of the people were not worried about the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the spread of slavery. They went to work and worried about their families, like most people.
I mentioned earlier I am reading Gettysburg: a Testing of Courage by Noah Trudeau. One thing I liked right off the bat was he said he made no apologies about writing another book about Gettysburg. It is actually the first worthwhile one-volume overview of the whole battle that has been published since 1968.
The author spends the first 100 pages or so on the events and movements in the two months leading up to the battle. He never foreshadows with hokey things about the upcoming "date with destiny at a small Pennyslvania crossroads town." Instead, he talks about the information people had and the decisions they made based on that. The last couple weeks of June 1863, everybody, especially the Confederates, were marching around Maryland and Pennsylvania, trying to figure out where the other guys were and consolidate their armies. I gave up trying to keep track of all these little towns and where everybody was. But as it gets to June 29 and 30, the town of Gettysburg keeps popping up more and more, and the reader gets a great sense of everything drawing to the clash of July 1. The author even wrote at one point something like: "By June 29, almost all of Lee's army was converging on Gettysburg but no one knew it."
I'm enjoying the heck out of it, I know what happens, but his writing style makes it seem fresh and the events unfold as they did for the participants.
Some serious historians don't care for Trudeau because he sells a lot of books and doesn't use the right kind of footnotes. I got kind of frustrated with one of his books when I tried to use it for a school project and had trouble indentifying some his sources. But if you really don't care if his quotes are from original manuscript sources or later published versions, you can't go wrong with one of his books.
::: posted by tom at 9:47 PM
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