Adam Goodheart: The Last Ordinary Day in 1860
[Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” to be published in April by Alfred A. Knopf. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.]
Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local newspapers found worthy of more than a cursory mention. The fall harvest was in; grain prices held steady. A new ice cream parlor had opened in the Eagle Hotel on Chambersburg Street. Eight citizens had recently been married; eight others had died. It was an ordinary day in Gettysburg....
Half a century ago, as the nation commemorated the war’s centennial, a scruffy young man from Minnesota walked into the New York Public Library and began scrolling through reels of old microfilm, reading newspapers published all over the country between 1855 and 1865. As Bob Dylan would recount in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume 1,” he didn’t know what he was looking for, much less what he would find. He just immersed himself in that time: the fiery oratory, the political cartoons, the “weird mind philosophies turned on their heads,” the “epic, bearded characters.” But much later, he swore that this journey deep into the Civil War past became “the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.”
In the months ahead, this part of the Disunion series will delve like Dylan into the sedimentary muck of history, into that age of unparalleled American splendor and squalor. Several times each week — aided in my research by two of my students at Washington College, Jim Schelberg and Kathy Thornton — I will write about something that happened precisely 150 years earlier. My subject may be as large as a national election or as small as a newspaper ad. I won’t be trying to draw a grand saga of the national conflict (much less searching for any all-encompassing templates). Instead, I’ll try to bring the reader, for a brief present moment, into a vanished moment of the past — and into a country both familiar and strange.
Read entire article at NYT
Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local newspapers found worthy of more than a cursory mention. The fall harvest was in; grain prices held steady. A new ice cream parlor had opened in the Eagle Hotel on Chambersburg Street. Eight citizens had recently been married; eight others had died. It was an ordinary day in Gettysburg....
Half a century ago, as the nation commemorated the war’s centennial, a scruffy young man from Minnesota walked into the New York Public Library and began scrolling through reels of old microfilm, reading newspapers published all over the country between 1855 and 1865. As Bob Dylan would recount in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume 1,” he didn’t know what he was looking for, much less what he would find. He just immersed himself in that time: the fiery oratory, the political cartoons, the “weird mind philosophies turned on their heads,” the “epic, bearded characters.” But much later, he swore that this journey deep into the Civil War past became “the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.”
In the months ahead, this part of the Disunion series will delve like Dylan into the sedimentary muck of history, into that age of unparalleled American splendor and squalor. Several times each week — aided in my research by two of my students at Washington College, Jim Schelberg and Kathy Thornton — I will write about something that happened precisely 150 years earlier. My subject may be as large as a national election or as small as a newspaper ad. I won’t be trying to draw a grand saga of the national conflict (much less searching for any all-encompassing templates). Instead, I’ll try to bring the reader, for a brief present moment, into a vanished moment of the past — and into a country both familiar and strange.