$34.95 U.S. (trade discount)
E-book TBD.
Softcover with gatefold flaps
384 pages with 116 photographs, maps, plans, and drawings
7.0″ x 9.0″ (upright/portrait)
ISBN: 978–1–938086–48–9
Published in April 2019
Distributed by University of Virginia Press
www.upress.virginia.edu
Published in association with the American Land Publishing Project.
Events and Exhibitions
March 15, 2013
Gettysburg National Military Park
Invited participant in the conference, The Future of Civil War History: Looking Beyond the 150th.
His panel, “Debating Battlefield Rehabilitation,” includes the former director of Gettysburg National Park, John Latschar.
(click here for more information)
by Brian Black
with a battle narrative by Richard B. Megraw
The first book to record how Gettysburg has been preserved and commemorated since 1863!
Ever since the American Revolution, sites representing key events in American history were crucial to the young nation’s efforts to formalize its story. And, following the Civil War, national history became a primary vehicle for patriotic and spiritual reconstruction, and sites such as historic battlefields served important roles in remembering the past during the nation’s subsequent challenging periods, including the Great Depression and Vietnam War.
Gettysburg Contested traces these patterns of commemoration back to the well-known field of battle of July 1–3, 1863, earning for it a new and lasting legacy as sacred ground that remains today, more than 150 years later. But the landscape history and record of preservation at Gettysburg is complicated, for Gettysburg has wrestled large issues, ranging from public vs. private development to the role of local vs. state vs. federal government, to the actual implementation of memorialization on the battlefield.
While the story of the battle is ingrained in the fabric of American memory, Brian Black’s account considerably broadens the scope. Never before has Gettysburg’s story been told so completely, offering layer upon layer, story upon story, to great effect. Gettysburg thus becomes a springboard to understanding more fully the nation’s need for sacred sites and symbols of America’s past, including cherished landscapes such as Gettysburg. In Gettysburg Contested, America’s treasured battlefield becomes the great laboratory for how Americans preserve and honor the past. Like America itself, the story continues to unfold right before our eyes.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
“The efforts to maintain the memory of Gettysburg have focused predominantly on the landscape that hosted the battling Confederate and Union forces in the hot summer of 1863. The landscape has passed through many differing episodes in the culture of historic preservation, many of which involved neither the National Park Service nor the federal government. Although Gettysburg has often acted as a measuring stick from which lessons of historic preservation could be applied nationwide, the unique importance of the battlefield in American history and culture has also, at times, made it very much an exception to national trends in preservation. Thus, the story of commemoration, memorialization, and landscape change at Gettysburg since the battle of 1863 offers important lessons to our collective understanding not only of that pivotal event, but the larger idea that President Abraham Lincoln conveyed just four and a half months later in his famous Gettysburg address of November 19: how best to remember, how best to consecrate the past so that those who died here “did not die in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
—Brian Black
About
About the Author
Brian Black is Head of the Division of Arts and Humanities and Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona. His articles on preservation and environmental history have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Civil War History, Environmental History, Journal of American History, Landscape, Pennsylvania History, Reconstruction, and USA Today, among others. He is the author and editor of several books, including Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), which was selected by CHOICE as an outstanding academic book for 2012, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), which won the Paul H. Giddens Prize in Oil History, and the four-volume Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of History and Science (ABC-Clio, 2013). Black has received awards and support from Penn State’s Institute of Arts and Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hewlett Foundation, and Gilder-Lehrman Institute for History, and, in 2012, he was awarded Penn State Altoona’s medal in Outstanding Achievement in Research and Creative Activity.
About the Contributor
Richard B. Megraw, whose ancestor from Pennsylvania fought and died at Gettysburg, is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and the author of Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 2008) and the forthcoming Gettysburg, Like Granite Under Foot: My Kind of Civil War Battlefield.
Slide Show
Praise
“This book tells what happened after the smoke of the Civil War battle at Gettysburg had cleared and Abraham Lincoln had delivered his greatest speech ever. Gettysburg Contested is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding not only that pivotal battle, but also the subsequent process of its memorialization. Brian Black has given us a work of consummate scholarship: rich in detail, clear and moving in narration, and loaded with insight into how Americans have created a national memory and a sense of the sacred.”
—Donald E. Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, Emeritus, University of Kansas, and author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance and A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
“Brian Black’s Gettysburg Contested is a superb biography of one of America’s most compelling historic sites. The drama of three days in July 1863 and the generations of commemoration, preservation, commercialization, and interpretation, bring Gettysburg alive for readers through a lively text and a treasure trove of visual materials.”
—Edward T. Linenthal, Professor of History, Indiana University, and author of Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields
“The study and interpretation of historical landscapes has established itself as a major field of study. Gettysburg Contested contributes to our understanding of the preservation and manipulation of one of America’s most cherished shrines. Brian Black’s strong narrative details the triumphs, failures, aspirations, and pitfalls of interpreting and preserving an institution that means many things—and often different things—to many people.”
—Roderick Gainer, Chief Curator, Arlington National Cemetery
“Over recent years, scholarship on militarized landscapes has ventured far beyond the battlefield itself. Brian Black’s handsomely illustrated book returns us to the battlefield, but this is a far cry from traditional military history; for Black has crafted a deeply intimate study of the politics and ecology of preservation, memorialization and restoration at one of America’s most hallowed pieces of ground. Steeped in a strong sense of place, Black’s handsomely illustrated book powerfully communicates the rich and complex layering of Gettysburg’s storied landscape since 1863.”
—Peter Coates, Professor of American and Environmental History, University of Bristol, and co-editor of Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain
“At Gettysburg National Military Park, the battle didn’t end in 1863. For more than 150 years, the place, its meaning, and its natural and cultural landscapes have been in the crosshairs of conflict. In this much anticipated and masterful book, Brian Black traces the battlefield’s complicated and contested history, both honoring and critically analyzing efforts to preserve what is among the nation’s most sacred spaces. Highly readable, beautifully illustrated, and deeply researched, Black’s book is required reading for anyone interested in historical preservation, environmental studies, and the U.S. Civil War.”
—Lisa M. Brady, Professor of History, Boise State University, and author of War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War
“It is high time that someone came up with this unusually able work. Gettysburg Contested makes a valuable addition to the history of this significant historical battlefield after the battle itself.”
—Gabor S. Boritt, Director Emeritus of the Civil War Institute and Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies, Gettysburg College, and author of The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows
“With a keen eye for the natural environment and a scholar’s sensibility, Brian Black illuminates Gettysburg’s transformation from bloody battlefield to affecting memorial—sacred ground subject to visioning and refashioning by competing constituencies since 1863. Exhaustively researched, deftly organized, and felicitously presented, Gettysburg Contested makes a valuable contribution to understanding Gettysburg’s preservation and to memory studies.”
—Michael J. Birkner, Professor of History, Gettysburg College, and co-editor of James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War
My Place
The ridges of central Pennsylvania have defined much of my life, and they continue to do so today. I am one of the lucky few who gets to pursue a life of research, writing, and teaching in the town in which he was born.
Nestled along the ridges that compose the start of the Allegheny Mountains, Hollidaysburg is a small hamlet of about 5,000 souls. The town has an abiding tradition of historic preservation, and much of this past harkens back to its integral position along the Main Line Canal of the early 1800s. The canal and the railroad that followed supported local industries, which primarily began with iron manufacturing. Foundries and iron plantations combined with extensive agriculture to make this area largely self-sufficient, even though it participated in trade networks with Pittsburgh. The ridges created impediments to this early trading but also supplied plentiful timber and coal to stoke industry’s fires.
Today, we have retained a great deal of the forests that cover the ridges. Although many of us use these areas for hiking, they have been preserved primarily for sportsmen. Subtle in the grand scheme of mountains, the Alleghenies are a permanent landmark connecting the region’s past to its future. With few exceptions in this region, human development has remained focused only to the gaps folded between ridges. It is a physical manifestation of a basic reality of life in central Pennsylvania: natural forms resisting at least some of the possibilities of modern life.
These very ridges, though, remain a tool for the nation’s progress. Energy extraction has defined life here for generations. Lumber, coal, and petroleum created central Pennsylvania and defined many lives in this place during the last 150 years. Now, the new frontiers of energy impact this place, with fracking of shale opening new supplies of natural gas and wind turbines generating electric power.
So there is great continuity where I live. It forms the strong base from which I travel to and write about other locales. I have made homes at the ocean, in great cities, and in the rural Midwest, but central PA and its ridges will always feel most familiar.
Copyright © 2013 Brian Black. All rights reserved.
