Word: gettysburg
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...GETTYSBURG (308 pp.)-Earl Schenck Miers and Richard A. Brown-Rutgers...
Crossing a road near Gettysburg, 13-year-old Billy Bayly met a mud-splashed Union cavalryman. Said Billy: "Hello . . . What's up?" ". . . You'll find out what's up," snapped the soldier, "the Rebel cavalry [are] close on my heels...
Billy is one of 42 eyewitnesses whose reports on the Battle of Gettysburg are the chief feature of this book. Historians have long since figured out just what happened at that decisive conflict, but Editors Miers and Brown have added a new wrinkle to the old subject by showing what the battle looked like to those who fought it, or watched it from ringside seats...
...life occurs, symbolically enough, on a Great Day in American History--Johnny Shawnessy is married (to a girl from the South) on the day John Brown is hanged; his son is born on the first day of the War; his wife goes mad simultaneously with the Battle of Gettysburg; and so on. His boyhood friends become symbols of American types--the ruthless financier, the self-improving politician, the cynical intellectual. And more subtle symbolism continues, page after page. More and more we see Shawnessy's self-identification with the County, with the river (which flows in the form...
...time of John Brown's execution. Their child is born on the night after the cannonade against Fort Sumter. Then Johnny learns Susanna's secret: she fears her mother was not the woman her father married, but his mistress, a handsome mulatto. During the days of Gettysburg, her mind finally gives way and she burns down the house, killing her child...