Gary Gallagher: belief

Transcript context

…You know, when you walk the ground of some of these battles, Gettysburg, is there something you can only experience when you’re there? In my experience, you cannot replicate in a classroom what you can do at a historic site, I mean a really historic site. You get people to a place like that, I’ve given untold tours on battlefields and other historic places. You can talk about so much more than just what you can s- First of all, you can understand what happened on the battlefield better than reading about it or looking at maps ’cause the terrain makes it much clearer. But you can also talk about, okay, what are the men like in the armies who are here? Why are they in the ser- A lot of the things we’ve talked about today, what’s the status of the war now? What are the political situations behind the lines? What difference will this battle make? What will happen if the Federals prevail or if the Confederates prevail? Or you can use, at a place like Gettysburg, the memorial landscape as a wonderful way to talk about memory from the war. Look at the inscriptions on the monuments. What was important when they put these up? And the later monuments, it’s … The opportunities for a teacher on one of these sites are just almost unlimited. And I don’t want to be too woo-woo, but I also believe from some of the experience I’ve had that the land has a kind of memory. I don’t know what it is.…

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