The Civil War’s allures, and horrors
In 1962, Drew Faust, then a girl growing up in Virginia, found herself “crowded into our aunt and uncle’s station wagon and headed off to war.” The occasion, though, was a happy one: the centennial re-enactment of the Civil War Battle of Antietam, a turning point for the Union Army that is perhaps better remembered as the single bloodiest day in America’s history. The anniversary events that day were designed not to foster solemn remembrance of those 3,600 deaths, but to be “a spectacle that would remind us of the courage and the sacrifice that we had been taught to revere since we were very small. “This was a carnival without carnage, a battle that was stripped of content and context,” Faust told a packed house at the Cambridge Public Library on Tuesday. The re-enactment was a formative moment for the young Faust, who would go on to become Harvard’s Lincoln Professor of...