It’s July 1, 2009, which means that 146 years ago today the Army of Northern Virginia tripped over some Union cavalry stationed at a small, college-friendly crossroads called Gettysburg. The Confederate troops were from A. P. Hill’s corps and included men in Henry Heth’s division. Yes, they had been looking for shoes, but they found instead the Army of the Potomac, and Heth—pronounced “Heeth,” and whom Lee reportedly referred to as Harry—ended the day with a head wound.

Also on the field that day was a young man named Wesley Culp. Although born in Pennsylvania—right here, in fact; one of the hills outside of town was named for his family—he had followed his employer to nearby Shepherdstown, Virginia, in 1858 and there joined the local militia. When the war started, he signed up with the Confederates while his brother William joined a Pennsylvania regiment. He was twenty-four years old in the summer of 1863 and just a smidge over five feet; he was so short, in fact, that his officers needed to fashion a special gun for him to use. He died with that gun on July 2 on or near Culp’s Hill.

According to our entry, there are various legends surrounding Culp,

for instance, that Henry Culp [the owner of Culp's Hill] was his father or perhaps his uncle. The historian Thomas A. Desjardin has argued that Henry Culp was, in fact, “a distant cousin he may scarcely have known.” This would make it less likely that young Wesley spent his summers playing on the fields where he was killed, as is often claimed. Another story has Culp visiting the Gettysburg home of his sister, Julia, the night of July 1, when she begged him to desert. Still another suggests that when he died, Culp was carrying a message addressed to Mary Virginia Wade of Gettysburg. It had been given to him by Wade’s fiancée, Johnston H. Skelly of the 87th Pennsylvania—another Gettysburg native and a friend of his brother’s. Culp had met Skelly after being captured and paroled at the Second Battle of Winchester (1863), where Skelly had been wounded (he later died). Wade, meanwhile, was the only civilian to have been killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. (She was hit by a stray bullet while, supposedly, baking bread.) As with many such stories, however, it is unclear whether these are true.

What is true is that the folks of Adams County, Pennsylvania, were not happy that one of their own had returned in an enemy’s uniform. In the June 3 Adams Sentinel, just below an item on the capture of Culp’s employer at Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, was this:

It is also said that another of our young townsmen, WESLEY CULP, was taken prisoner at the battle of Winchester—took the oath of allegiance to the U. States—was released—then joined a band of guerillas, and has been captured again. He is good and ripe for summary process, or at least ought to be.

Ouch. That still smarts, even after 146 years.

IMAGE: Confederate pickets on Culp’s Hill, from the Century magazine, 1884

Marse Robert lives on at the Uncyclopedia:

Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), or, as his club buddies call him, the iron horse, is a man of note in American history for his actions in the Civil War, in which he fought for the both sides. The first Asian-American military general, he dealt with many important situations like The Beatle of Gettysburg and the Impeachment of Richard Nixon. He had the most battle spirit of all the Confederate men, and a large beard that he once lost a sandwich in.

The article also quotes Ulysses S. Grant as suggesting that the “E” stands for “Excellent.” Our entry suggests differently, but it hasn’t gone to fact checkers yet. While we wait for that, though, I’d suggest you check out the Uncyclopedic take on Thomas Jefferson, which is not safe for the easily offended, and contains this still unverified quotation:

And I call this the University of Virginia. And I also call for their basketball team to suck every year.

IMAGE: Thanks be to Flickr user Sir Nadroj for his Robert E. Lee.

Over at BackStory, they’re considering the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence, prompting a detailed accusation of “BS” from one commenter, who objects, among other things, to the Declaration being referred to as “propaganda.”

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, artist Maira Kalman, author of the forthcoming And the Pursuit of Happiness, considers Monticello.

For more on Kalman, check her site. (For instance, she has illustrated The Elements of Style.)

I suggested just the other day that

. . . you can do like Cushman, and go to the Wilderness yourself. Cut the language screen down and try to feel what it’s like to just be there.

Now, when you’re done just being there, you can just be yourself off to Wal-Mart.

A split Orange County Planning Commission last night endorsed a Wal-Mart retail center proposed in the Wilderness battlefield area.

The 11-member advisory panel voted 5-4 to recommend that the Board of Supervisors approve a proposal by JDC Ventures of Vienna for the 51.6-acre commercial development. JDC must obtain a special-use permit for the center because of the size of Wal-Mart’s proposed 138,000-square-foot store.

The tract, one-quarter mile from the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, has been zoned for commercial use since the early 1970s. Last year Orange adopted a big-box ordinance requiring a special-use permit for stores of more than 60,000 square feet.

It’s now up to the Board of Supervisors.

PREVIOUSLY: Robert Duvall on the Wilderness

IMAGE: Wilderness battlefield on May 12, 1864 (Library of Congress)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom I’ve had a habit of quoting lately (here and here and here), is still reading about the Civil War. But he, unlike us, is not waiting for Robert E. Lee.

But to paraphrase Grant, I grow heartily weary of hearing of General Lee. I want to talk about us. How will we remember our heroes? What will those of us in Charleston, South Carolina have to say about Robert Smalls? About Robert Brown Elliot? In Holly Springs, Mississippi, who will raise a statue in memory of Ida Wells? Who will remember Hiram Revels and Daddy Cain? What does Baltimore have to say about Christian Fleetwood and New Market Heights? (Forgive me, but hyperlinks here are demeaning. These people deserve your own search.)

As usual, the comments are worth perusing. They run the gamut from “for real; keep burnin brethren” to “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” There’s a link to Sojourner Truth’s alternate lyrics for “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (which itself was an alternate lyric), and stories of playing Moors vs. Christians in Spain instead of cowboys vs. Indians.

Anyway, I find myself drawn to Coates when he’s writing about history, even as I’m sometimes annoyed by it. His writing is often melodramatic for my taste and frustratingly presentist. He seems to want to read history only to inform his current political and social outlook. (Here’s an especially egregious Case in Point from another blog.) It’s not that history can’t or shouldn’t inform your understanding of the modern world; it’s just that sometimes what’s lost is that history involves different worlds, different times, different people. There are not always easy parallels or simple lessons. The more we go looking for them, the more we’re likely to be fooled.

Moreover, history is a discipline just as law is a discipline. It encourages a certain way of thinking. It is about something more than just whatever it is we want to take from it for ourselves. Coates both succumbs to that temptation and, to his credit, acknowledges it:

I stake no claim on an objective reality—this is how it feels to me. Knowing that, maybe my view of history says more about me and my time in West Baltimore, and the premium the neighborhood put on righteous violence, then it does about actual facts. Moreover, I’m not sure my perspective is any better—I come to my history prejudiced,and baggaged, halfway looking for the truth, but more so looking for heroes.

I say this not because I am fully trained in the discipline or because I’m looking down on Coates. To the contrary, I admire his fiercely personal and intelligent investment in what he’s reading. And I am fascinated, too, because his perspective, as a black man from West Baltimore, is so different from mine, as a white man from Iowa. And the encyclopedia needs to remember that, too.

Not everyone cares about Robert E. Lee.

IMAGE: Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry; Washington, D.C.; by William Morris Smith (Library of Congress)

As the opening sentence of a book review, this one is not terribly impressive:

If you like history written as a novel, then Vicksburg 1863 by Winston Groom is for you. I enjoy reading history that way so it worked for me.

It comes from the blog Civil War Et Al., which is penned by a novelist. And while I realize that these are pet peeves, I am nevertheless frustrated by reviews that worry about what we, the readers, may or may not like. Why not worry instead about what you, the reviewer, liked or didn’t like? That’s more important. And if a book “worked” (whatever that means) only because you happen to like reading history written as a novel, then does that mean it didn’t “work” in some larger sense? In other words, do I have to share your predilections in order to like this book? If so, that’s not a review so much as it’s a casual recommendation from a friend.

(Then what’s a review? you ask. A review means engaging the book on its own terms, not on the terms of what you personally like and don’t like. A review asks whether the book accomplished what it set out to accomplish, not whether you personally liked it—or at least not only or even primarily whether you personally liked it.)

I mean no disrespect to Civil War Et Al. by voicing these criticisms. And anyway, what interests me most about that first sentence are the questions it raises but does not pursue: What does it mean to write history like a novel? Is that even a good thing?

I suspect that for most people, the answer is a resounding YES! Such books are more accessible to lay readers; they’re easier. They’re more fun. And that’s actually pretty important for the encyclopedia. Our authors are historians, but our audience consists mostly of non-historians. That means we have to avoid speaking in a language that only historians understand. And we do that by telling stories. (For better or for worse, I tried to do that with my entry on the Battle of Chancellorsville.)

Which is all well and good, except that sometimes history can suffer. One Encyclopedia Virginia contributor voiced that very reasonable concern in a recent e-mail:

My major overall concern is that these articles don’t become caricatures in which their subjects . . . are presented as they usually are, more for the sake of color and “human interest” than for the very real and very significant roles they played in the war.

I think that so far we have done well to strike a balance between the concerns of history and the concerns of, let’s say, accessibility. (That sounds condescending. I personally don’t need stuff to be accessible; I want it to be. I want it to be well written because I love good writing.) Which only raises another issue. And here I’m going to quote from Stephen Cushman’s excellent Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle, in which he asks some of these very questions where the Battle of the Wilderness is concerned:

But the next question is, do the embellishments and heightenings and shadings and manipulations that Civil War historians have always practiced necessarily help to re-create the war and make it live in the world around us? Much of the time the answer has to be yes. A well-written, briskly paced narrative that reads like a novel or thrilling tale will stimulate the imaginations of most readers better than a collection of dull, dusty records will. But for some readers, and I include myself in this group, the embellishments and heightenings and shadings and manipulations also call attention to the fact that a narrative is always only a screen of language woven from earlier language, and that screen can cut us off and distance us from the particularity of what has happened.

You can’t win, in other words. Or you can do like Cushman, and go to the Wilderness yourself. Cut the language screen down and try to feel what it’s like to just be there.

IMAGE: Confederate entrenchments along Orange Plank Road at the Wilderness battlefield (Library of Congress)

The exciting news around these parts is that our Robert E. Lee entry came in last week (we’ve been waiting) and is currently being edited. Our Civil War section has been in progress for more than a year now, but you may have noticed that we still haven’t posted Lee or Stonewall Jackson or J. E. B. Stuart.

WHY’S IT TAKING SO LONG? Part of the reason is that we want to get a feel for the section before we assign the most important entries. We want to get a sense of how we want the Civil War entries to read and how they’re working together. We want to make a few mistakes and learn from them before we jump into writing about dudes like Robert E. Lee.

WHAT KIND OF MISTAKES? One mistake we’ve learned from so far: many of the entries were assigned at too few words. Even some of the obscure generals have great stories, and it’s very difficult—deceptively difficult—to write a good short entry. But we also don’t want to run every entry at two thousand words. The entry’s length, after all, is one clue about the person’s or event’s importance. (Henry Wise is more important than Walter Taylor, for instance.) So editing a section requires thinking about how to strike that balance. (The Wilderness is a good short entry, by the way.)

WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU LEARNED? You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Civil War scholar—okay, technically we already knew that—which means that there is a lot of scholarship out there, which, in turn, means that a large part of the Civil War story is the telling of the Civil War story (the historiography, in other words). Where appropriate, our entries acknowledge the different ways historians have approached their subjects over the years, the arguments they’ve had and continue to have, and where things stand now. That strikes us as especially important when it comes to Lee. (Read our entry on George B. McClellan for an example of historiography.)

WHY SHOULD LEE BE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ENTRIES? Well, in a lot of ways it’s not. The thing about Lee, though, is that everybody’s going to read that entry. Our site’s traffic is boosted by Google searchers, and there are a lot of people looking for Lee, and they’re going to bring to the entry all sorts of assumptions and agendas and then judge the encyclopedia as a whole based on what we say about this one man. Which is fine. But we want to get it right.

WHY MAKE LEE PART OF A SECTION? If entries like Lee—and Thomas Jefferson, certainly, and George Washington—are likely to drive a lot of traffic to the site, then maybe it would make sense for us to just do them first. And we’ve thought about that, but it makes better sense to approach him in terms of the Civil War section.

WHAT’S THE UPSIDE OF SECTIONS? For one, we can employ scholars like Peter Carmichael of West Virginia University, to devise a topic list that allows us to think about the material in a broader scope. (The Civil War is not just Lee and Jackson. It’s religion and revivals; it’s battlefield preservation and controversial legislation.) Then, as we edit, we begin to think about how all the discreet entries begin to work together; they’re like puzzle pieces that fit together, telling a larger story. And Pete is there vetting the scholarship, making sure the encyclopedia is getting it right. Lee the icon may stand outside that story, but Lee the man does not.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR LEE? Speaking of icons, we’ve come to realize that you can’t get all of Lee into one entry. So we’re thinking about how to arrange for an additional entry on Lee in southern memory. In the meantime, the excellent entry we have will be edited in-house; then it’ll go to Pete; then off to fact checkers and copy editors. We’ll have it live on the site as soon as we can, but it’ll be a couple of months at the earliest.

So for now, check out the rest of the Civil War section and let us know what you think.

IMAGE: Thanks to stencil artist Matthew Rochon for giving us permission to reproduce his take on Robert E. Lee. Now go check out his blog, Uncanny Stencils.

A historical marker was dedicated last Friday to Sacagawea at the statue of Lewis and Clark on West Main Street in Charlottesville. The statue’s image of the Shoshone Indian woman has long been controversial; she’s kneeling, which some people have interpreted as being too subservient. According to the Daily Progress:

The statue was erected in 1919 by celebrated New York sculptor Charles Keck. At the time, there were varying opinions on the work: an article in Natural History magazine from 1919 says the artist represented Sacagawea “Bending forward, intent on the vast expanse of the ocean.” Paul Goodloe McIntire, who donated the statue to the city, said Sacagawea’s addition to the work made it “greatly improved,” according to documents kept at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society.

Still, many residents have thought Sacagawea’s stance is unfair. A group of about 25 women protested the statue in 1997, and city resident Jennifer Tidwell organized a protest about Sacagawea’s portrayal in October 2007. After the outcries, the City Council last year unanimously approved placing the marker commemorating Sacagawea next to the statue.

On Friday, Tidwell said, “I didn’t imagine a ceremony like this.” The event included Native American prayers, dancing, music and Sacagawea’s descendants blessing the marker.

“At the moment, I’m pretty moved,” Tidwell said.

IMAGE: This gorgeous photo of the statue (courtesy of Flick user Shmaktyc) shows Lewis and Clark standing tall and Sacagawea appearing to duck behind them.

BackStory had a great live event on Friday. Now they’re asking for your help with show ideas.

BackStory invites you to propose a topic for our fall season below and let us know why you think it would make for a compelling hour of radio. Which concerns facing Americans today could use historical unpacking by the History Guys? (Or, thinking ahead, what do you predict will be on everyone’s minds when autumn rolls around?) What are the most important questions surrounding your proposed topic?

Check out the site for more information, including good show ideas and bad show ideas.

Most but not all entries in Encyclopedia Virginia have a time line. (This one, for instance, does not.) At first, a time line seems like a simple thing; it takes a subject and reduces it to days, months, and years, succinctly outlining the life of a poet, or a governor, or a civil-rights activist. Still, non-biographical entries can be tricky. For example, war—and its constituent battles—is confusing. Things happen simultaneously. When historians can agree that an event actually occurred, they can’t always agree when it happened. Civil War battles are a case in point, and on our time lines you’ll find fuzzy labels such as “July 3, 1863, morning” and “April 6, 1865, 2:00 p.m.–night.”

Night?  Morning? Why so vague?

At this point I should back up and without getting too geeky explain how our time line system works. The EV Founding Fathers were wise when they developed the architecture for our website; they designed a system that was flexible. The idea was to make decisions that, down the line, would create opportunities, not close them off. This philosophy shows up even in our time line system.

All the dates and descriptions that come together to form time lines are stored individually in a database. (In other words, we have “July 3, 1863, morning” in our database and not “Gettysburg Time Line.”) This allows us to repurpose those dates and descriptions in all sorts of ways, like the “Today in Virginia” feature on our front page and “Explore Virginia,” which allows you to play with both time lines and maps.

Very cool, believe me, but the code that makes all this magic happen—in order to create one of these time lines out of all those individual times, days, months, and years—has to be able to dynamically and chronologically sort those events. Luckily, computers are good at sorting numbers, but they stumble when trying to figure out words like “morning,” “evening,” and night.” At the moment, our computer just throws its hands up and orders stuff arbitrarily, which is hardly ideal. But if we add more specificity to events—if we tell the computer when exactly morning begins and ends, for instance—we may be misrepresenting the history. We know something happened in the morning, but do we know when in the morning? Or did it last all morning?

The solution, which is still a work in progress, seems to be a combination of exact times for the computer to sort and fuzzy language for users to read.  This would allow us temporal wiggle-room while also reflecting scholarly uncertainty.  Maybe time lines aren’t such simple things after all.

IN ADDITION: Visit Bruce Robertson’s Historical Event Markup Language (HEML) project at Mount Allison University (New Brunswick, Canada) for a more thorough investigation into thoughts on how to assign temporal and geographic representations to historical event.

IMAGE: Pocket watch with chain