This project is a website guided driving tour of the Confederates' route to Gettysburg. It is one example of many possibilities that can be used to interpret history in a new way. The website has a page for each town the Confederates marched through. Each page consists of a timeline, maps, and events that occurred during the Confederate occupation. There are examples of how different groups of visitors can use the website. The groups are a family with children, empty nesters, and senior citizens. The website is valuable in that it provides history to people with the technology they already use. It also contains information about the Campaign that is often overlooked in the story of Gettysburg. / Department of Architecture

Thesis (M.A. in Hist.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1995. / Includes vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-110). Also available via the Internet.

My project examines the legacy of the Gettysburg Address from 1863 to 1965. After an introduction and a chapter setting the stage, each succeeding chapter surveys the meaning of the Gettysburg Address at key moments: the initial reception of the speech in 1863; its status during the semi-centennial in 1913 and during the construction of the Lincoln Memorial; the place it held during the world wars; and the transformation of the Address in the late 1950s and early 1960s marked by the confluence of the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln Birth Sesquicentennial, and Civil War Centennial. My final chapter considers how interpretations of the Address changed in textbooks from 1900 to 1965, and provides the entire trajectory of the evolving meanings of the speech in one medium and in one chapter. For each time period I have analyzed what the Address meant to people living in four cities: Gettysburg, Richmond, New York, and London. My argument is twofold. First, rather than operating as a national document the Gettysburg Address has always held different meanings in the North and South. Given that the speech addressed questions central to the United States (equality and democracy), this lack of a common interpretation illustrates that there was no singular collective memory or national identity regarding core values. Second, as the nation and world shifted, so did the meaning of the Gettysburg Address. Well into the twentieth-century the essence of the speech was proclaimed to be its support of the democratic form of government as opposed to monarchies or other institutions. But in the middle twentieth-century that interpretation began to shift, with many both abroad and at home beginning to see the speech’s assertion of human equality as its focal point and most important contribution.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 142 p. : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 106-110).

I explore nationalism within popular United States' history and analyze the nationalistic rhetoric within a popular novel, film, television documentary, and computer game that use the Battle of Gettysburg as their subject. With these examples I argue that popular history and entertainment cultivate social conditions amenable to war. Rather than strictly focusing on overtly and officially sanctioned political arguments, I interrogate recurring defenses of United States' nationalism within popular history and entertainment using the concepts of sociological propaganda and collective memory to further my argument. By focusing on popular representations of a seminal event in United States' history, I contend that such an event has been used to affirm nationalistic hegemony in the present.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed May 6, 2008). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: This thesis examines the evolution of the interpretation of the battle of Gettysburg, as well as how the analysis and presentation of the battle by multiple stakeholders have affected the public's understanding of the violence of the engagement and subsequently its understanding of the war's repercussions. While multiple components of the visitor experience are examined throughout this thesis, the majority of analysis focuses on the interpretive wayside signs that dot the landscape throughout the Gettysburg National Military Park. These wayside signs are the creation of the Park Service, and while they are not strictly interpretive in nature, they remain an extremely visible component of the visitor's park experience. As such, they are an important reflection of the interpretive priorities of the Park Service, an agency which is likely the dominant public history entity shaping understanding of the American Civil War. Memory at Gettysburg in the first decades after the battle largely sought to focus on celebratory accounts of the clash that praised the valor of all white combatants as a means of bringing about resolution between the two sides. By focusing on triumphant memories of martial valor in a conflict fought over ambiguous reasons, veterans and the public at large neglected unsettling and difficult conversations. These avoided discussions primarily concerned what the war had really accomplished aside from preserving the Union, as white Americans appeared unwilling to confront the war's abolitionist legacy. Additionally, they avoided discussion of the horrific levels of violence that the war had truly required of its combatants. Reconciliationist memories of the conflict that did not discuss the violence and trauma of combat were thus incorporated into early interpretations of Civil War battlefields, and continued to hinder understanding of the true savagery of combat into the present. This thesis focuses on the presence (or lack thereof) of violence and trauma in the wayside interpretive signage at Gettysburg, and argues that a more active interpretation of the war's remarkably violent and traumatic legacies can assist in dislodging a faulty legacy of reconciliationist remembrance that continues to permeate public memory of the Civil War. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2013

No description available.

By examining Virginia newspapers from the fall of 1863 this paper will bring to light what Civil War-era Southerners thought of the Gettysburg Address. This work is confined to Virginia not because that state is representative of the Confederacy, but because Southern reporting on the Address was wholly shaped by the Richmond papers. The first two chapters of this thesis reveal that Southern editors censored reporting on the Gettysburg Address because of Lincoln's affirmation that "all men are created equal. The final chapter traces Virginians' responses to the Address up to 1963. Drawing on newspaper editorials, textbooks adopted by Virginia's schools, coverage of the major anniversaries of the Address in the state's newspapers, and accounts of Memorial Day celebrations, this chapter makes clear that Virginians largely ignored the Gettysburg Address in the twentieth-century while Northerners considered it an essential national document. In 1963, as in 1863, it was the assertions about equality that Southerners could not abide. This divergence of response, even in 1963, lays bare the myth of a completed sectional reconciliation and shared national identity. / Master of Arts

In July of 1863 the photographs A Harvest of Death, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, and The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter were taken after the battle at Gettysburg by a team of photographers led by Alexander Gardner. In the decades that followed these images of the dead of the battlefield became some of the most iconic representations of the American Civil War. Today, Gardner's Gettysburg photographs can be found in almost every contemporary history text, documentary, or collection of images from the war, yet their journey to this iconic status has been little discussed. The goal of this thesis is to expand the general understanding of these Civil War photographs and their legacy by considering their use beyond the early 1860s. Although part of a larger scope of influence, the discussion of the photographs presented here will focus particularly on the years between 1894 and 1911. Between those years they were made available to the public through large photographic histories and other history texts as well. The aim of these texts, which framed and manipulated Gardner's images, were to disseminate a propagandistic history of the war in a way that outlined it as a nationally unifying experience, rather than one of division. These texts mark the beginning of the influence the Gettysburg photographs would have on American memory of the war. Within these books the four photographs became part of a larger effort to reconnect with the past and shape the war into a source for a unified American identity.