Word: svenson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battle-ground, author Peter Svenson illuminates the importance of this small patch of land in the Shenandoah Valley of northwest Virginia. Svenson does not try to argue that Cross Keys was in some way the most important battlefield of the Civil War. Rather, he reveals how the very elements that make Cross Keys like so many other battlefields also make it unique. In his narrative, Cross Keys becomes a place where the "great themes" of American History were fought out by individuals with their own historical identities on a Sunday in June, 1862. The land...
Battlefield is the story of one man's communion with the land and with history. The book begins with Svenson's purchase of a forty acre farm at Cross Keys in the mid 1980s. Svenson, a professional artist, bought this rural plot as a place where he could regenerate himself and provide a home for his wife and two children. The land itself and its history did not much interest him at first. But when Svenson realizes that the focus of the Battle of Cross Keys took place on his 40 acres, what began as a casual interest...
...Svenson provides an intriguing account of the battle. He gradually reveals its specific details through powerful firsthand accounts and battlefield reports. One of his most striking sources is the diary of a Confederate Major, who narrates the events up to the middle of the battle when he himself is shot and killed while writing. Others include the memoirs of Confederate General Isaac Trimble, the 68-year-old unlikely hero of the Confederate victory and General John Fremont, the Union commander whose miscalculations and lack of offense caused his army to lose the battle to a Confederate opponent half its size...
...battle itself forms only about half of Svenson's narrative. Battlefield is, after all, not the story of a single event but the story of a place. As Svenson builds his new house there, successfully harvests a crop of hay, and tries to eliminate the rampant groundhog population, he comes to recognize that his land, like the battle which took place there, is unique. His farm and the surrounding land have their own historical evolution, like any other part of the American landscape, which happens to have been punctuated by the military confrontation which took place there in June...
...Peter Svenson's Battlefield fulfills its image in the preface as "one small niche of Americana, peopled with real individuals and placed in a real setting." Splitting his narrative between the 1860s and 1980s, with several historical stops along the way, Svenson creates a personal and historical reflection. He tells essentially two stories while uniting them behind one central idea. Battlefield reminds us that real history exists beneath the "polemics." It may not put Cross Keys on the popular map of American History, but it does restore a sense of that history as a continuum of past, present and future...