Part eight in a series “Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true,” Ulysses S. Grant said in his Personal Memoirs. Grant was specifically referring to a fiction “based on a slight foundation of fact” from Appomattox Court House, where Robert E. Lee’s army surrendered. The formal surrender [...]
Author Archives | Chris Mackowski
Telling History vs. Making Art: Communicating “the incommunicable experience of war”
Part seven in a series “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war,” Oliver Wendell Holmes says at the beginning of Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War. Burns could not have picked a more appropriate quote to start his film with, not just because it set a particular tone for the entire eleven-hour documentary but because it [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: The Civil War’s great storyteller
Part six in a series. No written work embodies the tension between art and history more fully than Shelby Foote’s mammoth three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. Few people realize Foote was a novelist before he became the “warm and folksy raconteur” of anecdotal Civil War history; his novel Shiloh sits almost forgotten in the shadow of his magnum [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: Killer Angels, real and fictional
Part five in a series. In my last post, I began to discuss Michael Shaara’s aesthetic choices for constructing The Killer Angels as he did, and how he adopted a Lost Cause-interpretation of Robert E. Lee as a central choice for his novel. Where Shaara deviates significantly from Lost Cause tradition, though, is his choice to make Confederate [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: Gods & Jacksons
Part four in a series. One of my favorite places to work at Fredericksburg & Spostylvania National Military Park is the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, the small plantation office building where the Confederate general died. It’s a story I love so much that I wrote a book about it, The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson. But no book [...]
Bringing down the curtains
Most people don’t realize that George Washington, “Father of Our Country,” was a devoté of architecture and interior design. We tend to think of him crossing the Delaware, not dressing windows. “How extremely important this was to him, the extent of his esthetic sense, few people ever realized,” historian David McCullough has noted. “Only a [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: “Frankly, my dear….”
Part three in a series As the horn section carries Max Steiner’s score from its overture into the sweeping, now-iconic strings of its main theme, Gone With the Wind opens with haggard-looking slaves returning from a hard day’s work set against the first of many sunset backdrops. On-screen text immediately evokes a romanticized antebellum past: There was a [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: The ways we remember the Civil War
Part two in a series “We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born,” wrote Robert Penn Warren during the Civil War’s centennial; “or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.” Writer/activist Albion W. Tourgee, however, considered that moment [...]
Lincoln captures the humanity of American greatness
One of the things I’ve found most remarkable about the Civil War is the physical change that overcame President Lincoln during his time in office. The distinguished, thoughtful lawyer from Illinois who first arrived in Washington wasted away over four years; by 1865, he was virtually a smiling skeleton with a mop of bedhead hair. [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: "a tension between Art and Science"
Part one in a series As a battlefield guide at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park (FSNMP), I frequently speak with folks who’ve come to the battlefields because they’ve read The Killer Angels, which in turn inspired them to come see a Civil War battlefield. Michael Shaara’s novel is about the battle of Gettysburg and has nothing to [...]
Telling History vs. Making Art: An upcoming series at S&R
Introduction to a series As part of my doctoral work, I recently did some work that focused on Civil War literature. I use “literature” in a broad sense to cover fiction, nonfiction, and film. My interest in the topic stems from my work as a historian for Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. Visitors come to [...]
Big Meadow in the crepuscular hour
It’s the time of change. Autumn. Dusk. 6:40 p.m. The crepuscular hour. Everything’s on the cusp of being something else. I don’t know what has compelled me to drive to Big Meadow tonight. Shenandoah National Park is an hour away from where I’m staying in Chancellorsville this weekend, and Big Meadow is a half an [...]
The colors of change in the time of leavings
Autumn lends itself to metaphors of change because it plays itself out so brilliantly. Here in northwestern Pennsylvania, for instance, the hillsides boil with color. The change metaphor seems so common for this time of year—although it holds true for any season—but I could never reduce autumn to a cliché. My season of leavings continues, [...]
The way of the world and the time of leavings
She puttered around the house until well after midnight last night, washing one more glass, folding one more t-shirt. Later, she found another to fold. She also found, like an afterthought, a half-full bottle of aspirin that she slid, rattling, into a box of other provisions she’d set aside for my daughter, now off at [...]
The congress of cats in the crepuscular hour
On my walk this evening, far out in the country, I came across a sight I was probably not meant to see: a congress of cats gathered in the road. Three of them sat upright, far enough away that I first mistook them for turkeys. A fourth stood poised in midstride, the same color and [...]
S&R Honors
Click here to learn more about past honorees...- Corporate values lead engineers to deny industrial climate disruption
- Tournament of Rock IV: AC/DC vs. Phil Collins
- It’s the end of the world: how will you spend it?
- Do we need winter storm names?
- Climate disruption denial: a natural by-product of libertarian values
- Mystery Unraveled: How a white, moderate, married, churchgoing, middle-class, middle-aged woman could vote for Obama
- An open letter to Burt Rutan, regarding his WSJ commentary on human-caused climate disruption
- Climate scientists still besieged
- Pelosi on Bush: “He’s not worth impeaching”
- Anti-global heating claims – a reasonably thorough debunking
-
Timothy Chase: "... a certain percentage margin..." That would…
-
Brian Angliss: In some sense I am asking you to accept that clima…
-
Tony: I am not attacking QM, and possibly the wording wa…
-
Stacey Hofman: And if you need "male" approval.....*yes, Rick's f…
-
