Word: antietam
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...recognize the name of Cross Keys, Virginia, as a place of any significance in American History. Even among historians of the Civil War, the battle which took place there on June 8, 1862, was a relatively minor event, especially when compared with epic battles at places like Antietam and Gettysburg. Cross Keys seems like just one of thousands of places where Northerners and Southerners fought and died in America's bloodiest...
...entirely make peace with each other. In the year 2000, when they gather at conferences marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, they will still be arguing over Khe Sanh and Kent State, Tet and the Moratorium, just as old Union and Confederate soldiers relived and refought Antietam and Gettysburg well into this century, until they too had passed into history. That is the real bottom line on Vietnam: there is no statute of limitations. The war imposed a life sentence on an entire generation...
Awful superlatives issue forth like cannon fire from PBS's documentary series The Civil War. More than 620,000 Americans died during the conflict, more than in World Wars I and II and Vietnam combined. At the Battle of Antietam alone, 23,000 were killed or wounded, the bloodiest single day of the war. By 1864 the Union Army was the largest in the world, and Washington the most fortified city on earth. The Andersonville, Ga., prison housed so many Union POWs that it ranked as the fifth most populous city in the Confederacy...
...fact, Safire consistently skimps on physical descriptions. Photographers reach Antietam, the scene of the bloodiest battle in American history. What does it look like? How does it feel to be in the middle of unimaginable carnage? Safire disposes of such questions in two perfunctory sentences. Then he gets to the important part, a detailed exposition of how photographs are made, circa 1862: "He coated a sheet of glass with collodion, the guncotton dissolved in alcohol and sulphuric ether mixed with a little bromide and iodide of potassium they had compounded the night before...
First Manassas was such noisy, nostalgic fun that the organizers are talking about staging the battles of Cedar Mountain and Antietam next year, Gettysburg in 1988, the Wilderness Campaign in 1989 and Appomattox in 1990. In the meantime, there is no danger of peace breaking out and boring everyone. If the French and Indian War catches your imagination, there are rousing battles at Old Fort Niagara, a restored 18th century stronghold on Lake Ontario. The conflict usually re-enacted is the siege of Fort Niagara, won by the British in 1759. But, one Saturday not long ago, the Siege...