Musings on Gettysburg
Nov. 19th, 2009 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athenaltenaI didn't realize that today was the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address until I saw a blurb on a website, but it's appropriate given some of the stuff I've been doing and thinking about.
I'm in a Civil War history class this semester, and we watched part of the movie Gettysburg over a few days with the last scene on Wednesday. That class included the sequence of Pickett's Charge, which for those who don't know was probably one of the worst moves in military history and had over 6000 casualties on the Confederate side. It's largely considered to be the high water mark of the Civil War for the South, since after that they were never able to field that many men at once again and were largely on the defense from there on it. It was like Stalingrad in WWII in that the fact that it was the turning point didn't become clear until later (though the movie implies that Lee knew it right after the battle).
What really hit me is that they actually had enough reenactors in the movie to have the full 12,500 men who made the charge on camera, and it was quite the site. What really hit me is that it allows you to see just how many people that really was, and since we as humans only have a certain number of people we can imagine at once we look at a number like 12,500 and our minds go blank imagining what that really looks like. That's more than twice people than have died on the American side in the entire Iraq war. One thing the movie does really well is emphasize that all the people who died were Americans, adn that it really was a horrible war in that it caused Americans to kill other Americans by the thousands. It's been almost 150 years and we can still feel the effects.
The class was very quiet after the end, and I'm still thinking about it a few days later.
This song by the wonderful David Gray popped into my head as I was thinking about the movie, perhaps due to some of the lyrics.
I'm in a Civil War history class this semester, and we watched part of the movie Gettysburg over a few days with the last scene on Wednesday. That class included the sequence of Pickett's Charge, which for those who don't know was probably one of the worst moves in military history and had over 6000 casualties on the Confederate side. It's largely considered to be the high water mark of the Civil War for the South, since after that they were never able to field that many men at once again and were largely on the defense from there on it. It was like Stalingrad in WWII in that the fact that it was the turning point didn't become clear until later (though the movie implies that Lee knew it right after the battle).
What really hit me is that they actually had enough reenactors in the movie to have the full 12,500 men who made the charge on camera, and it was quite the site. What really hit me is that it allows you to see just how many people that really was, and since we as humans only have a certain number of people we can imagine at once we look at a number like 12,500 and our minds go blank imagining what that really looks like. That's more than twice people than have died on the American side in the entire Iraq war. One thing the movie does really well is emphasize that all the people who died were Americans, adn that it really was a horrible war in that it caused Americans to kill other Americans by the thousands. It's been almost 150 years and we can still feel the effects.
The class was very quiet after the end, and I'm still thinking about it a few days later.
This song by the wonderful David Gray popped into my head as I was thinking about the movie, perhaps due to some of the lyrics.
