On Tuesday May 5th - Scott Hartwig will present “Antietam: The Soldiers’ Experience.”
While many who study the American Civil War have opinions about the generals and generalship of the war’s battles and campaigns, our idea of the soldiers’ experience in those battles is largely shaped by Hollywood. We often imagine that somehow the Civil War was different than other wars America engaged in. It was in certain respects, but our mental picture of a Civil War battle is often at odds with what the participants experienced.
Through letters written in the immediate aftermath of the battle, when the memories of the engagement were still raw and fresh, and some outstanding post-war writing, we will try to strip away the nostalgia and myth and gain a greater understanding of what a battle like Antietam was really like for those who participated.
D. Scott Hartwig was the supervisory park historian at Gettysburg National Military Park and retired in 2014 after a 34-year career in the National Park Service, nearly all of it spent at Gettysburg. He won the regional Freeman Tilden Award for excellence in interpretation in 1993, and was a key player for the design of all aspects of the current Gettysburg museum/visitor center.
He is the author of To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign from September 3 to September 16, published in September 2012 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and of I Dread The Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and End of the Maryland Campaign, also published by Johns Hopkins in August 2023. The latter title won the 2024 Barksdale Award, Emerging Civil War Book Award, and was one of two books which received honorable mention for the American Battlefield Trust 2024 History Prize.