How Wars are Remembered

BY ROB HAVERS, Ph.D.

When the announcement about my impending move to the American Civil War Museum became public, an old colleague of mine, with whom I had team-taught military history at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst many years ago, called me and was enthusiastic about the move. He knew as well as I that the American Civil War is a conflict that continues to fascinate and appall us – a conflict that broke and re-forged a nation. That imperfect Union is one whose imperfections we still grapple today.

The Civil War continues to fascinate us, especially in Virginia, in large part because of its staggering human toll. As we make plain in our permanent exhibition, A People’s Contest, roughly 2% of the American people lost their lives between 1861-65 – some 750,000 men and women. Extrapolate those percentages to the contemporary US population of 330 million and the equivalent numbers of dead would be around 6.6 million. Those numbers could and should give us pause when we think of the cost of the Civil War.

The Civil War also continues to fascinate – and to challenge – us because of how and why it was commemorated and remembered. All conflicts, whenever and wherever they have been fought, often continue to be fought in the pages of history books and beyond in public commemoration.

An albumen print of Alexander Gardner’s shocking photograph showing Confederate dead along the Hagerstown Pike after the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), September 17, 1862. The battle remains the bloodiest day in American history

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

My own area of academic research explored the reality of life in a particular Japanese prisoner of war camp, one in which the prisoners were able to assert a far greater degree of autonomy over their existence and where they sought every opportunity to frustrate their Japanese captors. Despite the courage and stubbornness as prisoners, their experiences were often obscured by a more commonplace and popular perception of the experiences of Japanese-held POWs, that of broken men who were essentially powerless. This idea became the shorthand for understanding that experience. While this idea was not baseless, it was not the entirety of the story.

Applying this insight to the American Civil War Museum, one of the great aspects of our flagship permanent exhibition is how we seek to tell stories that similarly have not been well heard or not as visible. We have more to do, of course, to deliver on our broad and ambitious mission to tell the story of the Civil War from all perspectives, but we are well on the way to telling a fuller story.

In that regard, I am always reminded of the work of another former Sandhurst colleague and graduate school contemporary, Daniel Todman. His Ph.D. research (published in 2005 as The Great War, Myth and Memory) endeavored to look at how the British remembered the First World War. Not how they remembered it, definitively and for all time, but rather how the same war was remembered at different points over the ensuing 80 years.

In this work he endeavored to examine the very different ways by which different generations recalled the very same conflict. He examined the conflict and how it was talked about and commemorated at 30-year intervals, beginning in the 1930s, when the men (and women) who fought and won that conflict were still in the prime of their lives; in the 1960s, as age caught up with them and they had largely retired from their working lives; and also in the 1990s, when the war was 70 years in the past and only the youngest of those who had actually served in the war were still alive.

Todman studied not only the veterans themselves but how the wider nation marked the various anniversaries at the time. The commemoration discussions of the 1930s still told of the great victories of what still was considered a necessary war. By the 1960s, and with another world war most recent in the memory and with the Zeitgeist prompting student rebellions across the West, the view of the war by then was an example of naïve young men led to their slaughter by arrogant and ignorant generals. By the 1990s, there was no debate about the war as tragedy not victory, the soldiers being victims not heroes.

The research and the book looked at the same war but succinctly showed how the present deftly interprets the past in its own image. The war, as recalled in 1998, was not the same war recalled in 1930, even though the events had not changed. Wars, of course, are particularly vulnerable to mythologizing for a host of reasons; so powerful and tumultuous are their impacts that it is only natural that their remembrances should be similarly charged.

Of course, the memory of the American Civil War has been undergoing a similar analysis for more than a generation. The Museum’s audiences have heard thought-provoking presentations by historians David Blight, Caroline E. Janney, Thomas J. Brown, Ashleigh Lawrence-Saunders, and others.

Our challenge and our opportunity, at the American Civil War Museum, then, is deliver on our wonderfully expansive and inclusive mission to tell the stories not well told and also to tell the stories that are well known in new and engaging ways. I was particularly moved, in this regard, to see the wonderful Peter Jackson film, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which breathed new life into World War I era film footage and smoothed the jerky motions through computer generated additional frames and transformed black and white images into newly and accurately colorized pictures. Pioneering use of forensic lip readers also brought sound to these silent films. The impact was to compel viewers to rethink old images from a new vantage point and transcend the 100 years that separated modern audiences from the events on display.

When I first visited the American Civil War Museum, the colorized photographs that greet the visitor made me think of that film. Public history spaces, almost uniquely, have a power and opportunity to challenge both conventional narratives, and also to allow guests to see opposing points of view. The American Civil War, to my mind, has so much still to tell.

Dr. Havers is the Museum’s President and CEO and author of “Reassesssing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942-5” and “Battle for Cherbourg (Battle Zone Normandy).”

The closing section of the Museum’s flagship exhibit addresses the important question of how wars are remembered.

Penelope Carrington, ACWM