Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War Little Round Top Union

Why did we choose this topic, i dont know. Did you . Fall, chris took my civil war class out to Little Round Top and did an incredible job, not just telling us about what happened at Little Round Top, but he also did a really insightful job of helping my students understand the construction of historical narratives and focusing on chamberlain. A different way for my students to understand. Before chris gets going, i want to do a quick plug. Chris is a Gettysburg College alum. 2006. Raduated in i while at gettysburg is when believe you began to do some volunteer work for the park. My first year at the college, i worked at the institute. Internship at an the park working with john and scott. It was my First National park experience and i fell in love with it. I have been fortunate enough to make a career out of it. It has been a wonderful journey. I wish i was a student now. The program does Amazing Things across parks. So many things. I wish i had at my disposal when i was a student. I should add we just hired jimher civil war historian,. He is currently at connecticut college. You might have read his book. It is an important piece of scholarship. The students at Gettysburg College, and future Gettysburg College students, will have jim to take classes from. Fantastic. Is that an official announcement . I hope i have not jumped the gun. Breaking news. Last week is when i think things were settled and he signed on the dotted line. He will definitely be here in the fall. Fantastic. That is great. Chris, i will get it started. A little bit of background about your Early Experiences at the park. I would like to have a sense how visitors who came to little rock top, who came to the monument, can you tell us what informative thinking, what were their expectations when they came to one of your tours . That is a tough question to be able to answer. One of the things i find fascinating about Little Round Top is you have these layers of history stacked on top of one another. You have the prebattle history which is fascinating. The battle itself. Then the development of the battlefield at Little Round Top, the different organizations and entities that managed the landscape, and that is all fascinating. Then you have this additional layer of Popular Culture on top of it. I started with the park in 2003 and if you were to ask me what the general Visitor Experience was at Little Round Top in 2003, a lot of it was driven by Popular Culture. The movie gettysburg, the novel the killer angels, something about those pieces of work really brought Joshua Chamberlain and the story to life. Early in my career, gettysburg the movie was a touchstone for people. They got the box set, they saw the director cut. There is respect i have for visitors, they are trying to commune with the story and the battle with Joshua Chamberlain, because it has become a fixture of american fabric. I want to go to a place like Little Round Top and feel as if they are communing with the authenticity of the hill. You look at Little Round Top, if you were to go to the 20th main monument in 1982, you would barely find a trail out there. It was overgrown. It has evolved so much. Now you go in a portion that was once called the chamberlain avenue was repaved. The site gets incredible visitation, it is the single most visited but in gettysburg military parts. Parks. We get one million visitors a year and almost every of them goes to Little Round Top. It is this sense of, these rocks were here, and that sense of communing with this and the spirit of the past. Today, i dont think chamberlain let me rephrase that i dont think the movie gettysburg has significance to our visitors today as it was 10 years ago or as it was 15 years ago. I think in a certain sense, chamberlain in the 20th and 21st century has kind of outlived the movie. He has a significant now in his own right in terms of how americans who visit Little Round Top are thinking about the past. You can buy tshirts with Joshua Chamberlains face, go to the chamberlain tavern, Joshua Chamberlain action figures. He has outlived the popularity of the movie. What do you think about the movie gettysburg and its depiction of chamberlain . You can talk about the combat, jeff daniels. It is tough for me to be able to look at that movie objectively because in a sense, i am so emotionally attached to it. When did it come out, 1992 . 1993. Im 10 years old and the movie just captivated me. It was amazing. It captivated me. I fell in love with Joshua Chamberlain, with that depiction of the battle. I dislike it when individuals likeat a movie gettysburg or a novel the killer angels and try to pick it apart, try to critique it as a work of history. I was listening to john interview stephanie, and she was talking about the movie the patriot and how that movie took liberties with the story of the American Revolution in the carolinas. I think hamilton, the broadway play it is a work of art. It draws from the past, it is kind of its own thing. ,he value of those things gettysburg, hamilton, is not that they are this analysis of the past but they are entry points for people. They get people interested. They ignite some sort of spark that hopefully, and in my case, encourage you to want to learn more, to visit places like gettysburg. The park saw a huge surge in the d1990s after the movie g came out in that social trail to the monument became the table and highway. The Joshua Chamberlain highway. Just as joshua would have wanted it. No doubt. [laughter] but the value of Popular Culture is that it provides people with that entry. It gets them interested. I find far more value in those works, those mediums, than things that can pick apart and detract from the film or the play. Hamilton, after that play opened, the Hamilton National Historic Site saw an increase in visitation 174 higher than it had been. Im sure they were not prepared for it. No, no. I think, with a great deal of respect for the agency i work for, a lot of times, the Parks Services are reactionary. That happened with ken burns as well. That is what i was thinking. Ken burns. Chris is overwhelmed. Also, because that was back in the day when fall was not particularly busy. Right . Your season was mostly the summer. Burns was in the fall so they did not have people staffed to observe that visitation, which is a good problem to have. It is difficult. But i would say to that point is what we are seeing at parks like gettysburg is this evolution in visitation, where visitations are somewhat on a downward trajectory, it is not as calamitous as some people make it out to be, but what is more interesting is patterns of visitation are changing. On a normal day in the summer, Little Round Top is busy. On a normal day in october, Little Round Top is incredibly busy. It is incredibly busy. That idea of the summer time visitation is when people go to parks, that is true, but we get a ton of people in the fall now. [indiscernible] yeah. They were all over the place. They still are. We can talk about that too. The effect that has had on the Little Round Top is increased visitation. ,eople want to go to the hill they want to go to the maine monument they want to touch the , name on it, they want to climb up on the boulders. In terms of the park management, Little Round Top is one of the most fragile park ecosystems. We have a lot of challenges. Erosion, soil compaction, works that had been built during the battle and then restacked over the years. It is a fragile place, but it receives incredible amounts of visitation. I was going to say two points. My father took me to gettysburg for the first time in i had 1988. Visitation with my father on friday. He took me there. It happened to be the 125th anniversary, he had no idea. He took me to Little Round Top. That is where we went. We took my picture in Little Round Top in 1988, this little kid standing there. I am also wondering, i will also say we have double the amount of people watching this live then we have ever had, so this shows you what Little Round Top is. Name recognition coming around. What about people going up to see the scope of the battlefield . Because you have seen most of the battlefield on the hill area. You can see the scope, you can see straight up on a clear day. Did you see people doing that to showcase how broad certainly. Certainly. We are fortunate that we have this amazing cohort of licensed battlefield guides. These are contractors or selfemployed. Ofy give personalized tours the battlefield. Virtually all of them get out to Little Round Top. There is so much that appeals to the visitor that you can find. One, it is this iconic landscape. It is unique. It is this hillside covered with rocks and boulders, it is this iconic terrain. You can see almost the entirety of the battlefield from there, and there is value in that, giving people the spatial understanding of the battle. But at the end of the day, it is beautiful up on Little Round Top. You can watch the sun set over the hills. Such a pull Little Round Top has on people. Such a pull. It is like it is on the gettysburg bucket list. It is something you have to do. You have to park your car, go out to the summit, take that expanse in. You go up to Little Round Top any day of the week at sunset, the place is packed. We all have our childhood memories of gettysburg and Little Round Top. A powerful reminder that often that first connection to the past is an imaginative one. It is very magical. It is not necessarily historical. Historians do not lose sight of that very often. Academic historians almost always lose sight of that. It goes back to your point about the movie and what you said about the movie minded me of what Steven Spielberg said when he gave his november 19 address at the national cemetery. He made an obvious but important point. What he does is different than what we do as historians. We have different purposes and we connect with our audiences in different ways. That emotional linkage or connection is vital in that is why it is reaffirming in the spring to be driving around the battlefield and wherever you turn, there is another school bus. Even if those kids are not paying the best attention to the guide, i see them climbing over those rocks, hoping to god that they dont fall and break an arm or leg. Im thinking, they will never forget that. Maybe someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, they will pick up a book and think more seriously about the civil war. I absolutely agree. The Education Specialist at the Gettysburg National Military Park will often tell our young interns or seasonals about that very thing and oftentimes, we ask them, how did you get into history . What propelled you to want to work at gettysburg or take this internship . More often than not, it comes from a shared experience as a child. That might be visiting a place like gettysburg, it might be talking to your grandfather about his experience in world war ii, any host of things. I dont think for most visitors, it is not an intellectual exercise, it is an emotional exercise. That is what is pulling them there. Again, the value of that is it provides an entry point to study hopefully this is something the park service cares deeply about. It transitions people from not caring about parks and the past to becoming stewards of parks and the past. That is a job that the National Park Service Takes very, very seriously, so this idea of stewardship. We have to preserve this place because we want to pass this legacy onto our kids. Talking about childhood experiences on the battlefield, i will bring it back to chamberlain. I was fortunate to get to know her husband jim, alex wrote what i think a biography of Joshua Chamberlain that is exceptional. She did not find much fault with Joshua Chamberlain but she did a lot of research. The book is called in the hands of providence. She told me during the research they met Joshua Chamberlains granddaughter and she shared with alice and jim some mementos and a range of stories, including the story of Joshua Chamberlain taking his grandchildren to Little Round Top, to the maine monument, got a picture taken. I do recall that the grandchildren called Joshua Chamberlain, ginnie, for general. There might be a good point here. Help us understand how chamberlain made sense and depicted what happened at Little Round Top in the immediate week of the battle and maybe our audience has some questions, then take us into the postwar period, if you could, starting right at the end of the battle, chamberlain writes a series of accounts. How should we understand how he understood the fighting . The first thing we need to do is we need to recognize that civil war combat is inherently confusing and chaotic and any one individual has a very limited scope and understanding of what they went through. In the case of gettysburg, is 90 minutes. The fighting at Little Round Top is relatively brief. It was confusing, chaotic, it was an assault on the senses. It was this crucible of fire and confusion. Chamberlain is a brilliant guy, a brilliant, brilliant man. He was a socalled novice in terms of commanding men in battle. He had been in the United States army for less than a year by that point. He is in his mid30s, he fights this 90 minute battle, commanding 350 men. Done, when said and all is over, chamberlain, as with every other general in both armies, had to write a report that is submitted to his superiors that basically outlines his role in the fighting on Little Round Top. That is written by chamberlin i want to say on the sixth of july, 1863, a few days after the battle. In that official report he tries to make sense of what is inherently confusing. That is chamberlains first attempt to put into words what he and the surviving men went through. What we will see with Joshua Chamberlain to get to your point about chamberlain bringing his grandkids to the hill, that is something many veterans did, but it is a testament to how, for Joshua Chamberlain, the battle of gettysburg and more specifically those 90 minutes on Little Round Top, would come to define and dominate his life. It is how he understood himself. Everything before, his sterling academic career, his time at bowdoin, and everything after, governor of maine, president of bowdoin college, all of that is important, but it fades. His life is built on this 90 minutes at Little Round Top. With chamberlain is, as time passes, chamberlains understanding of what he survived and what he did on the hill kind of evolves, it changes. He wrote seven accounts of the battle of gettysburg. In the fighting Little Round Top. The first is july 6, 1863, his official reports. One is a magazine article. Those, you have other accounts, and none of those accounts agree 100 with the other. They are all departure points, they are all slightly different in how chamberlain understands what he did on the hill, what he ordered, what he said, and his role. Throughout this postwar period, postbattle period, chamberlain understands how important that moment was in his life and he will guard the story of the battle of Little Round Top and the hill itself, he will guard very jealously. Your point that there is an evolution in how chamberlain remembered and wrote about the battle, and his depiction of the battle, there are contradictions among these accounts. Does that make, in your mind, does that make Joshua Chamberlain unreliable as a historical witness . That is a great question because we talked about that the memoirs,ht, diaries, stuff like that that is written after the fact. When you have all these different narratives from one person and they are starting to not talk to each other, it makes you question some of the legitimacy of some of what he is saying. I know that there are people who have questioned that before, there are people like we have in our discussion area online who think that warren is a bigger star than chamberlain. You have to take that into consideration when you look through all this. He says this in 1863, but saying this