![]() That summer, following repeated victories in Virginia, Robert E. “People feel this license to be whomever they want.”Ī more somber air prevails on the fields and ridges around town, where the Valley of Death and Slaughter Pen speak to the carnage that occurred here in 1863. “It’s the banality of weirdness,” says Ian Isherwood, who teaches history at Gettysburg College. Residents are so used to this eclectic parade that they don’t even blink at buying groceries beside Stonewall Jackson or Clara Barton. In warm weather the streets fill with battle re-enactors, Lincoln impersonators, ghost-tour leaders carrying lanterns, and others dressed in everything from buckskins to World War II attire (the summer dress code seems to be “any time but the present”). This casual blend of past and present suffuses Gettysburg, attracting people who love to live history, and not just the Civil War. “And ladies, when you step back, tilt forward on your toes so you won’t trip on your hoop skirts.” “Good Victorian posture!” Bohleke instructs. I met the couple in the ballroom of the Gettysburg Hotel, teaching quadrilles and reels to 50 people practicing for a period ball. Bohleke is a case in point as is her husband, a scholar at Gettysburg’s Lutheran Theological Seminary, the cupola of which served as a lookout for both armies in 1863. This is also a community that takes history seriously while having serious fun. But due to an extraordinary rehabilitation of the battlefield in recent years, and nonmilitary sites in and around the town, visiting Gettysburg is a much richer experience than the one many Americans may recall from school and family trips in earlier decades. Tourist kitsch has always been part of Gettysburg’s appeal and much of it remains. Until just a few years ago, the battlefield visitors center stood near Gettysburg’s “High Water Mark” (the farthest point reached in Pickett’s Charge) and within sight of a wax museum, a restaurant called General Pickett’s Buffets and a clot of souvenir shops. When I visited as a boy in the 1960s and ’70s, the battlefield contours included the Home Sweet Home Motel, a 300-foot observation tower and a Stuckey’s restaurant. Recapturing history with such precision wasn’t always so easy at Gettysburg. “That’s what’s so chilling and special about Gettysburg,” Carmichael says. The field in the photographs aligns perfectly with the one we’re looking at in 2013, right down to clefts in individual boulders. Then he walks a few paces and lays the 1863 images on the ground. As evidence, he shows me photographs taken just after the battle of bullet-riddled corpses. “The Confederates who charged here were mowed down in minutes,” says Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. But 150 years ago it was filled with the shriek and smoke of the bloodiest battle in American history. On this wintry day in 2013, the field is frozen and silent. ![]() Climbing over a snake-rail fence, Peter Carmichael leads me across a field of grass stubble and gray boulders.
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