Since today is the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War and I'm going to be a Social Studies teacher, I feel obligated to create a blog post. The Civil War began at the dawn of the photographic age. At the time, neither side really contemplated the idea of military censorship of photojournalism. Thus, all people (including civilians) were given a glimpse of soldiers, battle scenes and the ravages of war. The public was shocked by the brutality they saw, and shattered were their previous romanticized images of the nobility of war. The number of casualties in the Civil War always shocks me. 620,000 died which was almost 2% of the total U.S. population...if the same percentage died today, it would be about 6,067,600. Astonishing!
Currently The Library of Congress has more than 400 of these images on display in an exhibit called The Last Full Measure (which you can also see online by following this link). While they are mostly photographs of individual soldiers, looking at their faces is quite powerful. The most astounding detail is how young some of them were. I've heard that the Union army had 100,000 soldiers who were 15 or younger...prime age for students in a lot of our classes. The uniforms was the other detail that stuck out, some in "street" clothes. We forget that this was still the day when our military force basically cobbled together groups of militias, most members having little military experience. That's a far cry from the "fighting unit" of today.
Anyway, I thought we should all remind ourselves of the struggles we have been through in our nation as a little perspective on the struggles we face today.
No comments:
Post a Comment