DEPLOYING OUR POOR POWERS TO ADD OR DETRACT.

I respect the canon of scholarly inquiry that holds there is no final say on any subject.

Seven score and sixteen years after the repulse of Pickett's Charge, there is still plenty for the student of the Battle of Gettysburg to digest.  Consider Allen C. Guelzo's Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which we'll offer as Book Review N^o. 4, and then stand down for Independence Day.

Professor Guelzo is of Gettysburg College, and he has looked into letters home and other primary sources in order to put together a chronology of events that might be more accurate than previous histories, although he concedes that some of the canonical controversies (Stuart and the rebel cavalry losing communication with the invading army; Ewell misinterpreting "if practicable" at the end of the first day; several events on the second day; possibly even Meade's failure to pursue more aggressively after the repulse of Pickett's charge and the reports of the rebel army withdrawing) might be beyond resolution by the application of human knowledge.  His preface also laments the trendy multiculturalism that marginalizes military history generally, and Civil War histories that lack a sufficiently diverse cast particularly: that, however, is an academic tic, and Civil War histories might pass market tests more readily than culture studies stuff, no matter how reconditely theorised.

The Last Invasion begins long before the armies collide.  If one wants to be pedantic, the event we refer to as the Battle of Gettysburg is actually Second Gettysburg.  Read the book.  Or catch a campfire talk at the park.  And if you want to fool around with alternative histories, consider one in which Lee is able to cross the Susquehanna to menace Philadelphia: would "cut it off and kill it" become a phrase some six score years before its time.  It concludes with Abraham Lincoln musing to a small crowd of well-wishers shortly after Independence Day that I recently alluded to.

Perhaps the most important lesson for the researcher is that it's surviving winners who write history.  That includes Bowdoin's Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, rhetoritician, politician, and long-enduring.  To say more might be to unleash a spoiler.  Find yourself a library and read the book!

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)