On Tuesday, President Obama announced that he would use the power of the executive office to aid college graduates in repaying their federal student loans. The president's new measures will make it easier for students to peg loan payments to their income and to consolidate their different federal loans to earn a slight break on interest rates. Some wonder if the announcement is a response to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests. Regardless of its intent or timing, both measures could save indebted graduates up to hundreds of dollars a month. These new initiatives will not affect private sector student loans, which are, of course, beyond the executive's purview.

These changes will amount to little more than a band-aid, however, if the cost of higher education continues to outstrip rising costs of living. Loan debt has been surging over the past two decades in an attempt to keep pace with advancing college tuition costs that consistently exceed rising incomes by a wide margin. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, from 1980-81 to 2009-10, tuition at both private and public four year institutions rose by a staggering 135%, even after adjusting for inflation. State funding for public institutions declined every year from 2001 to 2005, reaching a 25 year low in per student funding in the latter year. State appropriations increased the next two years, but those gains largely were wiped out by the recent recession. Not surprisingly, tuition rates typically surge to cover shortfalls in public funding for post-secondary education. Even when public funding is increased, however, statistical trends show that tuition rates generally continue to increase as well, albeit at a slower rate. The result is that the percentage of funding for public higher education derived from individual tuition has increased steadily over the last 25 years. In 1982, tuition represented 22.1% of total education revenue (monies appropriated for public post-secondary education). By 2007 tuition accounted for over 36% of total education revenue, according to a 2008 report compiled by the group, State Higher Education Executive Officers (see the table on page 21).

As college costs are shifted increasingly from the public to individual students, average student loan debt, predictably, has increased as well. Higher education is one of the soundest "investments" that an individual can make, well worth taking on debt in order to complete a degree. As a consequence, student loan debt is now the second largest single source of individual debt in America, surpassing credit cards and lagging behind only mortgages. Yet, while student loans are an integral part of the higher education system, advancing per capita debt levels might threaten future generations' opportunities to pursue higher education, potentially undermining the mission to make higher education (particularly public education) available for all Americans who wish to pursue it. Earlier this year, a survey of student loan debt revealed that increasing numbers of students are taking on debt that likely will take 20 years to repay, meaning that today's graduates who go on to become parents conceivably could still be paying off their own debt while preparing to send their children to college. And this long term debt might restrict parents' ability to send their children to the college of their choice or to send them to college at all.

Perhaps we need to re-assess whether or not we, as communities, should contribute more tax dollars to public post-secondary schools and thereby shift some of the burden of educational expenses back from individual students to the communities that benefit from having a well-educated public. After all, public education is an undeniable public good. We also might need to reassess the entire higher education system, however. Four-year institutions have gobbled up an increasing percentage of college students, at the expense of two-year institutions like community colleges and trade schools that offer equally valuable avenues to rewarding careers and future educational opportunities. We all are probably familiar with the well-known statistics showing that graduates of four-year institutions tend to make far more money over their lifetime than graduates of high school and two-year institutions, but it would be dangerous to interpret those statistics as proof that four-year institutions offer the only education of value. A more robust system of higher education would have mechanisms to keep costs under control, stop the "privatization" of public higher education, and better promote the variety of higher education choices beyond four-year institutions.

As the Occupy Wall Street protests continue and expand across America and around the world, many public commentators are looking to the past as a guide to understanding the movement and its potential impact. Last week, Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik and esteemed historian Alan Brinkley were among those who drew a connection between OWS and the Bonus Army of 1932. Both groups, dismayed by economic collapse and a lack of jobs, demanded that a seemingly unresponsive government use its power to alleviate economic distress. Both groups also chose the tactic of occupying public ground and essentially holding vigil within sight of their intended audience, refusing to be ignored. In the case of the Bonus Army, approximately 10,000 of them encamped at Anacostia Flats, within sight of the U.S. Capitol, hoping their presence would pressure Congress into hearing their demands.

It is those demands that provide some of the more notable differences between these historical movements, however. The Bonus Army sought a specific solution to their own economic woes, namely to pressure Congress into the early payment of promised bonuses for their service in World War I. By law, those bonuses were not to be paid until 1945 (in response to the veterans' demands, the House voted in favor of immediate payment of the bonuses in June 1932, but the Senate overwhelming defeated the House bill). Unlike OWS, the Bonus Army largely was focused on a single change in policy, not systematic reform, and that policy change would have benefited only veterans like themselves, not a broad swath of society.  

Martin Hutchinson, writing for Reuters, makes a more apt comparison between the Wall Street protests and Jacob Coxey's march on Washington in 1894. Marching from Ohio to the nation's capital, Coxey was joined by hundreds of unemployed men and families who shared his frustration over the high unemployment caused by the 1893 Depression, the worst economic crisis of their generation. Similar marches sprang up in the West, driven mainly by jobless young men. Coxey's army was driven by a populist ethos and urged the federal government to fund internal improvements projects that would put men to work and increase the supply of paper currency to relieve debt. The march petered out when Coxey and his army reached Washington and several of them were arrested for trespassing on the grass at the Capitol building. Despite the ignominious conclusion of its march, Coxey's Army influenced future debates over the power and propriety of the federal government to employ deficit spending and other fiscal measures to alleviate the effects of economic recessions. Like Coxey's Army, OWS protesters are responding to the worst economic crisis that they have ever known. Similarly, they espouse a populist message, decrying increasing wealth inequalities and outsized corporate influence over government. Implicit in their complaints is the notion that government should be the instrument to enforce corporate responsibility and reign in corporate power (despite the fact that many OWSers believe the government to be wholly beholden to those same corporations).

Despite these similarities, though, the demographics of Occupy Wall Street appear to differ significantly from Coxey's Army. Though the contemporary movement has become increasingly diverse in age, at its core OWS largely has been a movement of young, highly educated, middle class citizens. Coxey's Army, in contrast consisted mostly of relatively young agrarian and skilled and semi-skilled laborers. And while OWS occupies public property in a protest vigil, the Coxey-ites' march on Washington connoted a more dynamic, militant posture toward the government. Furthermore, Coxey's march was fueled by an evangelical mindset (the marchers dubbed themselves Army of the Commonweal in Christ) wholly absent from the decidedly secular Occupy movement.

Ultimately, these well-intended efforts to place the Occupy Wall Street movement in historical context appear to suffer from too narrow a focus. The movement itself acknowledges inspiration from Egypt's Tahrir Square protests and the so-called Arab Spring generally. It sees itself not as an American movement, but an international one. In this respect it echoes student protests and democratic movements that proliferated around the globe in the late 1960s, particularly in 1968. And while OWS shares similarities with the more militant Bonus Army and Coxey's Army, it also resembles the countercultural movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s in their critique of materialism, their rejection of organizational hierarchy, in the youth and education level of its core participants, and in the nonviolent method of protest. Curiously, some commentators shy away from making this comparison, perhaps in reaction to harsh critics of the movement who have peremptorily dismissed it as the collective whining of, in Hitzlik's words, "idle hippies." It is clear, however, that the OWS defies such myopic and pejorative descriptions. Wherever and however it ends, we will be able to better understand the movement if we take a broader view both of its historical antecedents and the international context in which it was born and continues to grow.

The state of North Carolina unveiled a commemorative license plate for the Civil War yesterday, promoting the official themes of the state's sesquicentennial observance: Freedom, Sacrifice, and Memory. While some state legislatures established official commissions to guide their commemorative programs, North Carolina's did not. Instead, the state's Office of Archives and History in the Department of Cultural Resources formed a Civil War 150 committee to devise programs to mark the sesquicentennial. The office ought to be commended for consciously choosing themes that cover a wide range of subjects and engage a variety of perspectives on the war, from men and women to secessionists and unionists, soldiers and non-combatants, and slaves and freedpeople, among others.

Unlike the controversial proposal this past February to put Nathan Bedford Forrest on Mississippi's license plate, North Carolina is using its plate to display its inclusive themes prominently. They are stamped across the top of the plate, just underneath the URL address for the Civil War 150 committee. The plate also features an image of a Civil War artillery crew in shadow (and therefore neither "blue" nor "gray"), manning a cannon. The martial image might seem somewhat jarring when paired with committee's grand themes, but it is not surprising in light of the fact that the plate is designed to be attractive to a broad base of potential customers. Seemingly heroic, martial images likely sell well among Civil War buffs and casual observers alike, and proceeds from the sale of these plates will go right back to the Department of Cultural Resources. It's another interesting intersection of the educational imperative and the profit motive, and one that appears to have been resolved in far less controversial fashion than the above-mentioned proposal to use license plates honor Confederate "heroes" like Forrest.

Historical commemorations often invite spirited debates over the purpose of commemoration itself. Should the primary purpose of our commemorations be to celebrate our shared past and reaffirm our communal and national identity? Should the primary purpose instead be to educate us not only about the heroic but also the horrific aspects of our shared past? Think, for instance, of the uproar over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit for the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War II (as well as continuing controversies over a subsequent exhibit involving the aircraft).

The West Virginia Sesquicentennial Commission has been dealing with a similar controversy over the past year. Disputes over whether the commission should promote educational programs or support local commemorative events geared toward tourists (and their disposable income) led to the resignation of several academic historians from the commission, a development that we discussed in a previous blog post. As a new article in the Charleston Sunday Gazette recounts, the commission is facing a new controversy. At issue is whether or not the commission's funding of local commemorative events extends official state sanction to them. Institutions and events that receive funding from the commission are required to use the state sesquicentennial logo on its printed material, giving those materials the state's literal imprimatur. The commission has funded Guyandotte Civil War Days, a three-day event scheduled for early November, which will feature a talk by H. K. Edgerton, a pro-Confederate speaker and re-enactor who promotes the Black Confederate myth. By funding this event, it could appear that the state's sesquicentennial commission implicitly sanctions Mr. Edgerton's controversial interpretations of black involvement in the Civil War.

At Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin has periodically debunked Mr. Edgerton's repeated claims that thousands of black southerners fought for the Confederacy, and his most recent post about Mr. Edgerton announced that he had been dropped from the Guyandotte Civil War Days schedule. Now, however, Mr. Edgerton is back on the schedule. He is unquestionably an engaging speaker, and he has gained relatively widespread notoriety from his many appearances and Youtube videos, usually arguing that free and enslaved blacks fought alongside white Confederates in solidarity. Mr. Edgerton likely will attract a significant audience, and his talk might add to the "success" of Guyandotte's Civil War Days, but at what cost? His claims typically lack historical evidence, except to cherry-pick and fetishize individual stories of black southerners "serving" on the front lines. 

What is the West Virginia sesquicentennial commission's responsibility in this regard? Should the commission expect a certain level of expertise in the educational events it funds? Does the commission bear any responsibility to question or challenge Mr. Edgerton's typically spurious claims about the war, or should it simply state that the opinions offered at such events do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the state or the commission on the causes and conduct of the war? In other words, what standards and practices should we expect from our public institutions charged with commemorating the Civil War?

@Civil War Memory, @Dead Confederates, @Cenantua's Blog, @Crossroads

The Library of America recently published a collection of the writings of Ambrose Bierce, arguably the most perceptive and incisive American writer of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Bierce labored in the shadow of the more famous Mark Twain, perhaps because Bierce's finely honed cynicism and mordant sense of humor cut more deeply than that of his contemporary. In his review of this volume for The Atlantic Monthly, the literary critic Benjamin Schwarz contends that Bierce's cynicism gave the writer a clear-eyed view of human nature that most other writers fail to achieve. Mr. Schwarz, like many biographers and literary critics, traces that cynicism at least in part to Bierce's harrowing experiences as a Union volunteer in the Civil War. Bierce fought in several major battles, including Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Kennesaw Mountain, during the last of which he was severely wounded.

Mr. Schwarz sums up Bierce's opinion of the war in the following arresting passage:

Emerging from the charnel house, Bierce shunned any effort to invest the butchery with meaning - including the North's smug myth of a Battle Cry of Freedom (still cherished by many contemporary historians, as it flatters their sense of their own righteousness). For him the war was nothing more - could be nothing more - than a meaningless and murderous slaughter, devoid of virtue or purpose.

Mr. Schwarz appears to concur in Bierce's view, denigrating historians who write about the war's freedom struggles as self-aggrandizing elitists. His invocation of "the North's smug myth" is steeped in George Fredrickson's outdated, acid interpretation of the conflict. Many contemporary historians rightly acknowledge that millions of Americans, black and white, northern and southern, slave and free, struggled to turn that war into an instrument of freedom for over three million slaves. These struggles were not a smug myth to those who labored for freedom, nor were they the invention of supercilious historians employed to demonstrate an outsized sense of their righteousness. They represented the honest efforts of individuals who worked unceasingly to give direction and purpose (often multiple purposes) to the awful crisis that enveloped them.

Even Ambrose Bierce's photo will judge you

Beyond Mr. Schwarz's disdain for historians who trumpet the war as a "Battle Cry of Freedom," one wonders if we can simply conclude that Bierce simply believed that the war truly was "devoid of virtue and purpose." While a teenager Bierce lived for a time with his uncle, an avowed abolitionist who claimed to have furnished munitions to John Brown when the latter settled in Kansas. The youngster imbibed some of his uncle's idealism, and when President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the insurrection in South Carolina in 1861, Bierce was one of the first in his county to enlist. Looking back as an adult on his youthful enthusiasm for the adventure of war, he wrote, "At one time in my green and salad days I was sufficiently zealous for Freedom to engage in a four years' battle for its promotion. There were other issues involved, but they did not count for much with me." Unsurprisingly, hard campaigns and terrible battles left him with a far more jaundiced view of the conflict upon its conclusion. Though Bierce disavowed the naïve idealism of his callow youth, I doubt very much that he would have preferred a quick end to the war if it meant leaving slavery intact and safeguarded in the South for generations to come. War might have been an awful instrument to end slavery, but once it commenced it was the only instrument available. And despite his embittered recollections of his service later in life, he remained committed to the goal of fighting for freedom, re-enlisting and serving for nearly the duration of the war (and re-enlisting in the army again in 1866, well after the conflict had concluded).

Yet, even if we accept the notion that Bierce had concluded that the war was nothing more than a remorseless, purposeless slaughter, how much credence should we give that assessment? A brilliant and witty writer, his acerbic social critiques at times verged on self-pitying complaints against an unfeeling and hypocritical society. He shared this point of view with another contemporary writer, Henry Adams, who spilled much ink upbraiding a society that had not allowed him to ride the coattails of his illustrious political family to a life of ease and high public esteem. It is Bierce's sharper wit that saves his writing from being insufferable in the vein of Adams' tendentious autobiography. Still, our appreciation for his intelligence and prose style should not lead us to adopt his social critiques, particularly in regard to the war, like unquestioning sycophants.

One of the interesting projects that have been inspired by the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is the effort to recover and refurbish the grave sites of veterans. Last year, for instance, we reported on the collaboration of volunteers, college students, and representatives of state government in Pennsylvania to identify, refurbish and decorate long-neglected graves of veterans of the United States Colored Troops. Today brought news of an effort by a local chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War to supply headstones for the graves of 10 veterans at Fairplains Cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

At first blush, these and similar efforts across the country might seem like a macabre way of commemorating the conflict, but they do much more than that. They literally place long-dead soldiers back on our historical map, re-situating them not just in a particular locality, but in a community in a specific time and place. Rediscovering and marking their resting places can help historians and researchers who try to reconstruct the lives of these individuals, the communities they lived in, the social networks they were a part of, and the connections with fellow soldiers that they maintained or left behind after the war. Here's hoping that efforts like these continue throughout the sesquicentennial and beyond.

One of the interesting projects that have been inspired by the sesquicentennial of the Civil War is the effort to recover and refurbish the gravesites of veterans. Last year, for instance, we reported on the collaboration of volunteers, college students, and representatives of state government in Pennsylvania to identify, refurbish and decorate long-neglected graves of veterans of the United States Colored Troops. Today brought news of an effort by a local chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War to supply headstones for the graves of 10 veterans at Fairplains Cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

At first blush, these and similar efforts across the country might seem like a macabre way of commemorating the conflict, but they do much more than that. They literally place long-dead soldiers back on our historical map, re-situating them not just in a particular locality, but in a community in a specific time and place. Rediscovering and marking their resting places can help historians and researchers who try to reconstruct the lives of these individuals, the communities they lived in, the social networks they were a part of, and the connections with fellow soldiers that they maintained or left behind after the war. Here's hoping that efforts like these continue throughout the sesquicentennial and beyond.

I was away from the blog again as I settled into my new position as the managing director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center here at Penn State. Between production of the center's Journal of the Civil War Era, preparing to oversee a new postdoc position at the center, and setting up professional development workshops for our graduate students, I haven't had much room to blog. Today, however, an interesting news item caught my eye. Beginning this Friday, the "unsurrendered" flag of the Beaufort (S.C.) Volunteer Artillery will be placed on display for the first time in 115 years at the Verdier House, headquarters of the Historic Beaufort Foundation. The display of the flag coincides not only with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, but also the tricentennial of Beaufort's founding.

According to the article, at the close of the Civil War a member of the BVA wrapped himself in the unit's flag, rather than hand it over to the Union forces to whom his unit had surrendered. Thus, the legend of the "unsurrendered" flag began. Eventually (the article does not stipulate when) the phrase "An Unsurrendered Flag" was stitched onto the banner. As a symbol, the BVA flag raises a host of fascinating questions. Was this largely a symbol of South Carolinians' unconquerable spirit, or, more sinisterly, an angry rejection of the new civil and political order that followed in the wake of defeat? I am most curious to know when that defiant phrase was added to the flag. After all, if the soldiers of the BVA stitched those words onto their colors shortly after their surrender, we arguably could view it as an expression of their unit pride and as a stubborn insistence that they might have been bested but not beaten in this war. This would be a predictable response to defeat, an effort to palliate wounded pride and bitter disappointment at the end of Confederate independence.

An Unsurrendered Flag from a Surrendered Unit

If, however, the intractable words, "An Unsurrendered Flag" were added to the banner later, during Reconstruction or the so-called Redemption of the South, then it would seem to have an altogether different meaning. The flag could be read as an expression of increasing recalcitrance in the face of Republican Reconstruction government and resistance to the reality of black freedoms and political rights. Of course, no matter the intent with which the flag was altered by its "authors," it remains an endlessly intriguing symbol precisely because it likely expressed all of these meanings and still more to its myriad viewers over the last century and a half, leading one to wonder what symbolic meanings does the exhibition of this flag communicate today?

Quick: where was the first Thanksgiving held in America? If you answered Plymouth Plantation then either you remember your elementary school history very well, or you're probably a New Englander like me. If you answered Berkeley Plantation in the state of Virginia, however, then you've probably been to the Berkeley Plantation historical site, a site that seeks to set the record straight (as it sees it) on the real origins of Thanksgiving. In early August, I had occasion to visit this beautiful, sprawling site along the James River, and I was struck by its fixation with historical origin stories. The plantation grounds feature several examples of a 60 year campaign to claim that Thanksgiving was celebrated first at Berkeley, a full year before the Pilgrims recorded their Thanksgiving feast with their Native American allies. Berkeley literature points out that this thanksgiving was celebrated with a group prayer immediately upon settlers' disembarkation in the New World after their harrowing, months-long voyage to the Chesapeake region. This is altogether different than a Thanksgiving feast, of course, but the content and purpose of said Thanksgiving seems to matter less to Berkeley's operators than the simple claim of having been the originator of the tradition.

The first Thanksgiving......or is it?

Berkeley does not stop with that claim, though. Based on a 300 year old letter noting that plantation residents evinced an unusual affinity for the distillation of whiskey out of corn, the site claims to have housed the first distillery in the New World. It's hard to imagine that the rough-hewn settlers of the older Jamestown colony weren't producing whiskey long before Berkeley settlers made their way across the ocean, but Berkeley seems comfortable to rest its claim on this single document. Unfortunately, this preoccupation with origin stories and defending Berkeley's historical pride of place represents a lost opportunity to provide a much more meaningful historical education at the site. The staff at the plantation was unfailingly polite, patient, attentive, and gracious, but they also seemed unequipped to explain to visitors what life and labor was like at Berkeley and how it changed over the nearly 400 years of its existence for the diverse peoples who lived there: Native American, European, African, Caribbean; slave and free.

Re-enactment of colonial whiskey-making. A

proud Berkeley tradition?

Established in 1619, Berkeley Plantation has a long history, and a significant portion of that history involves slave labor. By the time Benjamin Harrison built his Georgian mansion on the site in 1726, he had begun accumulating slaves to work the land. Eventually, over 100 slaves tended tobacco on the sprawling plantation. By the time of the Civil War, only about 30 slaves worked the estate, which mostly produced wheat and corn by that point. Flanked on either side by two-story, brick outbuildings, the mansion clearly required a substantial staff of slaves to operate the household. Yet, beyond indicating that there was only one surviving inventory of slaves from the antebellum period, the guided tour offered no descriptions of slave labor or slave life at Berkeley. Sadly, there appeared to be plenty of evidence to offer a rather full account of slaves' activities there. A scale model of the plantation in the antebellum period showed half a dozen outbuildings fronting the mansion, which no longer exist. These buildings included a carpentry shop, smithy, laundry house, and other work buildings. These structures almost certainly would have been built through slave labor, and slaves would have performed the work in these buildings for much, if not all, of the structures' existence. The massive plantation clearly mixed industry and agriculture on a large scale in its heyday, and it very likely employed free as well as slave labor. Yet, the site's literature and tour offered little insight into the plantation as a major site of economic activity or its impact on the diverse communities along the James River. Nor did it shed light on the working relationships of free and enslaved, white and black laborers.

The front gate at Berkeley Plantation

Instead of taking on these controversial but potentially illuminating issues, the site engages in relatively meaningless and unavailing efforts to prove it originated certain long-lived cultural traditions. Would it change the cultural import of Thanksgiving if it were begun at Berkeley and not Plymouth? Would either place cease to have a meaningful or august history if it were found not to have originated this tradition? The value of historical sites is not attributable to their role in originating specific cultural or historical traditions. Rather, their value lay in what they can tell us about our shared past, which is a much more meaningful contribution to public history education.

After a week's vacation in my home region of New England, I returned to Penn State just in time for Tuesday's mild earthquake. Aside from a brief shimmy in the floor, I noticed no other signs of the quake here in Happy Valley. Of course, it was disappointing to learn of the damage that the quake caused along other parts of the East Coast, particularly to some of the national monuments and historic structures in Washington, D.C. You likely know by now that the National Cathedral sustained significant damage, and the Washington Monument sustained cracks in the blocks near its pinnacle. Now comes news that the monument will be closed indefinitely and might not reopen to the public, even when repairs have been completed.

This is not the first threat to the monument, which was a source of consistent controversy early in its construction. Upon Washington's death, there had been several calls for a permanent memorial to the nation's first president, but it was not until the centennial of his birth, 1833, that citizens formed the Washington National Monument Society and began to raise money for that purpose. The original memorial design called not only for an enormous, 600-foot-tall obelisk, but also a colonnade surrounding it that would contain statues of 30 Revolutionary War heroes. Prohibitive construction costs and sharp criticism of the plan's grandiosity as unbecoming a memorial to a republican leader soon forced the Society to focus solely on constructing the obelisk itself, however.

Construction began in 1848, but limited funds caused the Society to resort to innovative methods to subsidize the monument. They invited states, philanthropic organizations, individuals, and fraternal societies, among others to contribute blocks of granite (of standardized sizes) for the interior of the monument. Conceived as a novel way to raise funds and support from across the nation, this decision unwittingly ensured that the memorial would become mired in divisive political debates that contributed to the antebellum realignment of political parties that precipitated southern secession and Civil War. The donated blocks carried inscriptions from the providers, effectively turning the monument into a platform for promoting various, often opposing political views and social values. Stones advocating such disparate political issues as temperance and even Welsh nationality were donated to the construction. The territory of Deseret (now the state of Utah), whose leaders repeatedly defied federal authority in the territory and claimed an autonomy that seemed to separate it from the rest of the country, contributed a stone perhaps as a meager olive branch of sorts to the nation.

More important than these oddities, a stone contributed by Pope Pius IX, thrust the monument into the middle of violent, new political conflicts over the place of Catholicism and immigrants in American culture. As the political parties realigned in the North after 1854, virulently anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Know Nothings briefly emerged as the main opposition to the Democratic Party. They seized upon the Washington Monument as a potent symbol of their national movement, and in 1854 Know Nothing devotees stole Pope Pius' stone (like many of the other inscribed stones, it had not yet been installed in the interior of the monument). They did not stop there, seizing control of the Washington Monument Society, and portraying their stewardship of the still-uncompleted obelisk as a means of "purifying" both the monument and the nation (Ironically, according to the NPS website for the monument, the construction that proceeded under the Know Nothings' stewardship was so shoddy that it had to be torn down and replaced).

The Know Nothings' politicization of the uncompleted memorial proved so controversial that it caused a Congress to rescind a $200,000 appropriation that it had made to the Society (after years of cajoling and lobbying by its previous officers). The monument thus came to reflect the increasingly sharp political divisions of the antebellum period. Know Nothing mismanagement of the Society and the party's sudden collapse dealt a serious blow to efforts to raise funds for the monument's completion. The intensifying sectionalism of the 1850s appeared to trump the hopes of the Washington Monument Society's original officers, that the monument itself would be a source of national pride and a symbol of national unity. Finally, the Civil War halted construction of the memorial. From the disastrous management of the monument by the Know Nothings through the Civil War and Reconstruction, little progress was made on building the obelisk for over 20 years.

This ultimately proved to be a temporary lull, and not the death knell of the monument itself. The national centennial in 1876 provided new impetus to finish the memorial to Washington. With the destruction of slavery and the reunification of the country, the monument gradually re-emerged as a symbol of national unity. As Reconstruction ended and fundraising improved, the Society conducted extensive inspections of the existing structure and base to ensure the viability of continuing the project. Construction on the obelisk resumed in 1879, and in 1884 it finally was completed at a height of 555 feet. As they did before construction resumed in the 1870s, today engineers are giving the obelisk a thorough inspection to assess needed repairs. It will be a shame if visitors no longer will be able to enter the monument after the repairs are completed, but at least we can rest assured knowing the structure will be repaired and likely strengthened. That was something Americans could not be sure of in the middle of the 19^th century, when it looked like the monument might never be completed.

Over the course of my last few blog postings, I've been discussing both the concept of interpretation and the ways to protect our resources for future interpretation. For this posting I'd like to continue with this train of thought and discuss how a few of our interpreters literally bring history to life. By this, I'm referring to our living history interpretive programs.

Living history programs are fairly simple at first glance, but they are very effective interpretive tools. Essentially, a living history person will dress up in period costume and portray a historical figure, such as Lydia Leister, and conduct an interpretive program from that historical figures first person perspective. Leister was a widow who owned a small farm that was commandeered by General George Gordon Meade during the Battle of Gettysburg. Leister and her six children found shelter with family along the Baltimore Pike.

The Leister Farm

When she returned to the farm after the conclusion of the battle, she found artillery damage to the house and fences, and much of her furniture scattered in the yard. Moreover, her livestock had been driven off in the battle and her food stores were depleted by Meade's staff. Dead soldiers, horses, and mules still littered the yard. Leister had to assess the damage and figure out how to recoup at least some of her losses to keep supporting her children. According to the blog Civil War Women, she burned the bones of the dead horses and sold the ash as fertilizer. Done correctly, a living history program can really make an impact on a visitor. In this case, it can recreate the fear, anguish, and perseverance of Leister during the battle. This basically is what interpretation is all about: making a significant, even emotional, impact on our visitor. When working the information desk at Gettysburg, I've often had visitors come up and comment on how much they love our living history programs.

The Leister Farm today and monument commemorating

Meade's headquarters

Another way in which living history programs are conducted is through living history demonstrations that are conducted every weekend during the summer months at the park. These demonstrations are small-scale reenactments conducted by small groups of living historians sanctioned by the National Park Service. These living historians go out on the battlefield, and depending on what unit that they are representing, will march, drill, fire their muskets, or even fire a period cannon! Once again, visitors really appear to enjoy these demonstrations. Many people coming into Gettysburg expect to see a reenactment or something along those lines, and these programs are the closest thing that we have to battle reenactments. Even these small-scale demonstrations teach our visitors much about how soldiers maneuvered and behaved in drill and battle. Either way, living history provides a fun and immersive way for visitors to learn and interpret the actions and experiences of soldiers and civilians on the battlefield

@Civil War Women, @My Year of Living Rangerously