Civil War History Activities
Due to its close relationship to a crucial battle in the American Civil War, Gettysburg College hosts a number of activities and awards:
- Pennsylvania Hall, located in the center of campus, was occupied by both Union and Confederate forces during the Battle of Gettysburg. Today, a Civil War era-style flag (for the year 1863) flies above the building, which was used as a lookout position and a field hospital during the battle.
- In 1982, professor and historian Gabor Boritt founded the Civil War Institute, which hosts annual seminars and tours on Civil War themes. Scholarships are granted to high school students and history teachers to attend the week-long summer event.
- Since 1998, the Gettysburg Semester, a semester-long immersion in Civil War academic study has been offered.
- Gettysburg College students may elect to pursue a unique interdisciplinary minor in Civil War Era Studies. Requirements include a general introduction course about the Civil War and a capstone senior-level seminar. Students must also select four classes of at least two disciplines. Some of the classes offered include (but are not limited to): military history, Economics of the American South, Civil War Literature, films about the Civil War, and Gender Ideology in the Civil War.
- The Lincoln Prize has been awarded annually since 1991 for the best non-fiction historical work of the year on the Civil War.
- Starting in 2005, the Michael Shaara Prize has been awarded for excellence in Civil War fiction. (Shaara was the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels.)
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Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war, history and/or activities:
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“[Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)