Dwight T. Pitcaithley: The National Park Service Begins Explaining the Causes of Our Wars
[HNN Editor: The focus of this article is on the Civil War.]
... Between 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred the Civil War battlefields from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, and the late 1990s, the NPS avoided all mention of the causes of the war in its exhibits, films, and publications. Eighty years after the 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the agency still adhered to Governor William Mann's admonition that "we came here, I say, not to discuss what caused the war of 1861–65, but to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man."3 In a small exhibit inside Fort Sumter installed in 1995, the National Park Service first connected slavery with the coming of the war.
Three years later, battlefield superintendents decided, as the country approached the 150th anniversary of the war, that it was time the NPS began presenting the causes of the war to the visiting public. Once word of the meeting and its "radical" resolution became public, the National Park Service was inundated with approximately 2,400 cards and letters from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, members of Civil War Roundtables, and the general public who were motivated to write after reading incendiary articles claiming the NPS was "demonizing and slandering" the South with its "new" interpretation of the war. Many of these letters expressed the mistaken belief that the NPS was going to eliminate all military history from the parks and replace it with "some momentarily fashionable, politically correct, sensitive etc., ideology."4 Another correspondent believed that the park service should not "change history so that it is politically correct," while yet another objected to the battlefields being used as "South-bashing, hate-generating propaganda centers."
The anticipated interpretive apocalypse did not occur, of course, because (1) the decision to present the causes of the war was intended only as a preface to, and not to replace, the military interpretation of the battlefields, and (2) the Park Service worked closely with Civil War scholars to ensure that the enhanced interpretation conformed to current historical thinking about slavery and its role in the secession movement and war. The resulting exhibits and publications have been received almost without comment from those who had convinced themselves the National Park Service was engaging in "South-bashing." Indeed, the revised or new exhibits and publications clearly reflect the scholarship of secession over the past decade. The National Park Service also realized that using primary materials whenever possible carried more influence than quoting even the most highly regarded of Civil War scholars. Presenting the entirety of Mississippi's declaration of "Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of Mississippi," for example, in the new interpretive center at Corinth, Mississippi, brought visitors, even skeptical visitors, face-to-face with the words and ideas of the secessionists themselves. The declaration's second sentence, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world," speaks volumes about the motivations of those who engineered Mississippi's secession in January 1861....
Read entire article at AHA Perspectives
... Between 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred the Civil War battlefields from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, and the late 1990s, the NPS avoided all mention of the causes of the war in its exhibits, films, and publications. Eighty years after the 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the agency still adhered to Governor William Mann's admonition that "we came here, I say, not to discuss what caused the war of 1861–65, but to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man."3 In a small exhibit inside Fort Sumter installed in 1995, the National Park Service first connected slavery with the coming of the war.
Three years later, battlefield superintendents decided, as the country approached the 150th anniversary of the war, that it was time the NPS began presenting the causes of the war to the visiting public. Once word of the meeting and its "radical" resolution became public, the National Park Service was inundated with approximately 2,400 cards and letters from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, members of Civil War Roundtables, and the general public who were motivated to write after reading incendiary articles claiming the NPS was "demonizing and slandering" the South with its "new" interpretation of the war. Many of these letters expressed the mistaken belief that the NPS was going to eliminate all military history from the parks and replace it with "some momentarily fashionable, politically correct, sensitive etc., ideology."4 Another correspondent believed that the park service should not "change history so that it is politically correct," while yet another objected to the battlefields being used as "South-bashing, hate-generating propaganda centers."
The anticipated interpretive apocalypse did not occur, of course, because (1) the decision to present the causes of the war was intended only as a preface to, and not to replace, the military interpretation of the battlefields, and (2) the Park Service worked closely with Civil War scholars to ensure that the enhanced interpretation conformed to current historical thinking about slavery and its role in the secession movement and war. The resulting exhibits and publications have been received almost without comment from those who had convinced themselves the National Park Service was engaging in "South-bashing." Indeed, the revised or new exhibits and publications clearly reflect the scholarship of secession over the past decade. The National Park Service also realized that using primary materials whenever possible carried more influence than quoting even the most highly regarded of Civil War scholars. Presenting the entirety of Mississippi's declaration of "Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of Mississippi," for example, in the new interpretive center at Corinth, Mississippi, brought visitors, even skeptical visitors, face-to-face with the words and ideas of the secessionists themselves. The declaration's second sentence, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world," speaks volumes about the motivations of those who engineered Mississippi's secession in January 1861....