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  • Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields by J. Christian Spielvogel
  • Dwight T. Pitcaithley (bio)
Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields. By J. Christian Spielvogel. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Pp. 190. Cloth, $34.95.)

Interpreting civil wars is always tricky business. The problems are compounded when the federal government (one of the participants in civil wars) attempts the explanation. So it is for all civil wars, so it has been for this country's civil war. The Department of War was the first to try its hand at interpreting the five national battlefield parks created by Congress during the 1890s; then, when those lands were transferred to the National Park Service (NPS) in 1933, that federal agency became responsible for presenting the nation's killings fields to the visiting public. Aware that a southern public might be sensitive to the idea of the Confederacy being portrayed by the victorious national government, the National Park Service quickly entered into an arrangement whereby all interpretive media in Virginia would be reviewed for appropriate content by the state historian and by none other than Douglas Southall Freeman. Navigating the tortuous waters of Civil War interpretation continues to challenge both the federal government and the interested public. [End Page 141]

In Interpreting Sacred Ground, J. Christian Spielvogel sets out to examine how the National Park Service has negotiated the war's cultural memory and how its efforts have "contributed to and continue to shape the broader cultural struggle for interpretive dominance of the war's legacy" (5). A professor of communication, Spielvogel analyzes NPS interpretation along two theoretical axes.

The first asks the question: Does park interpretation reflect the traditional "reconciliationist" interpretation developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or does it present the war through a mid- to late twentieth-century "emancipationist" lens? (Spielvogel forth-rightly credits David Blight as the originator of these terms.) After examining exhibits at Harpers Ferry's Virginius Island, John Brown's Fort, and John Brown Museum, he concludes that through the recent inclusion of a large amount of information on slavery, the park has gone a long way in introducing an emancipationist memory of the war that balances and even overshadows the older exhibits, which tended to be more descriptive of the built environment. The newer exhibits make Harpers Ferry a more "stimulating and provocative place" (81), according to Spielvogel, although he correctly observes that the concluding exhibits in the John Brown Museum "leave visitors with the impression that racial inequality is a thing of the past" (82).

The other line of inquiry asks whether the National Park Service leans toward a military "heroic masculine" view or a "savage" perspective as it explains battles and war to the public. For the answer to this question, Spielvogel analyzes interpretive messages at Gettysburg National Military Park and Cold Harbor, a unit of Richmond National Battlefield Park. Not surprisingly, given the eight decades that the NPS has been interpreting the Civil War, Spielvogel finds interpretive evidence of the military heroism/courage trope as well as the presentation of savage interpretations of the battle. In general, he determines that reconciliationist/heroic interpretations of the battle reside in older exhibits and that emancipationist/savage interpretations are present in more recent exhibits and interpretive panels. This generalization is speculative, however, because the age of the interpretive elements is not consistently stated.

Ultimately, Spielvogel concludes that the presence of both reconciliationist and emancipationist interpretive traditions in a battlefield park assists visitors in their attempt to understand the battle and its implications. He questions, however, given the power and longevity of the former, whether the emancipationist memory will ever become the dominant narrative of the war's memory. He also draws attention to the issue of visitor perception of competing "countermemories." With what message does [End Page 142] the visitor leave the battlefield when opposing traditions are presented? Spielvogel argues that different narratives enable battlefields to become "sites of contested public memory" that encourage visitors to think deeply about the war, its complexity and its savagery, rather than passively accept a monochrome version of the past (151).

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