Where are they now?: Three approaches

One thing that I always appreciated at the various battlefields and museums we visited was when sites told us what happened after the fact for the individuals they talked about in their exhibits or videos. During the trip, we saw three different ways to do that, each of them effective for different reasons.

The first was at Shiloh, whose orientation video was far and away the best that we saw during the entire trip. It integrated first person stories - focusing on specific individuals during the battle - with broader narrative seamlessly, had just the right amount of excitement and seriousness, and was well-edited and well-filmed besides.

After the video but before the credits, each "character" from the film, from Ulysses S. Grant on down to couriers and privates, was given a short biographical slide with a photograph from later in life and a text description of where they went in life. It was great to see, for example, that the young Confederate courier we saw in the film survived the war and returned to the battlefield to help establish it as a National Park many years later. I thought that this style was an effective way of bringing out a personal story and then sharing its ending without lecturing or spending too much time.

The second was at the Museum of the Confederacy in Appomattox, Virginia. It featured two different "continuation" sections, one focused on soldiers, and one focused on civilians. These two sections were in different parts of the exhibit space; the first was in the midst of the space telling about the army and fighting of the war, and the second in the war's aftermath section.

Where are they now? Soldiers Edition.

Where are they now? Civilians Edition.

This method had the benefit of being interactive, and of allowing the visitor a choice as to which soldier or civilian to learn more about. One major problem, however, was that the panels didn't stay turned. They were difficult to turn over in the first place, and unless you held them down, they would snap right back to their top photograph very quickly. This discouraged me after reading two or three stories.

The last way of sharing stories was at the Chancellorsville Visitors Center. It was a small space, with generally outdated exhibits; it looked to my eye as if this particular section was a much more recent installation. It wrapped around an interior U-shaped wall of the entire exhibit space. No matter where you were in the space, one of your walls (to your left or behind you) was covered with stories.

In case you can't read the small label that began the exhibit, it explains: "Green panels in this exhibit identify individuals who survived the war. Black panels denote those who died."

I loved this approach. Several things about it were simple and yet effective.

First, the background color was subtle yet immediately obvious. Choosing a dark green instead of a bolder color meant that you could pick up quickly the information they wanted to convey, but your eye wasn't constantly drawn to the bright colors instead of the black colors. Standing at one end, or stepping back, gave an immediate overall sense of the horrors of war - there were so many black panels.

Second, soldiers and civilians were side by side. Each person had a short story to tell, and the text captured it succinctly. Putting everyone in together emphasized the point that any war, and especially a civil war, takes a terrible toll on a country's civilian population in addition to its soldiers.

Third, it continued throughout the entire gallery. No matter what you were learning about, you had a reference point and a consistent source of interesting information that grounded all the broader exhibits about corps organization and medical care.

Fourth, I even like the somewhat random scattering of these signs. No long, straight line, but a natural jumbling up that allows the eye to move from one panel to the next with interest.

Has anyone ever seen a "where are they now?" installation done? What do you believe are the most effective techniques for doing so?

Day 12: Appomattox Court House and the Museum of the Confederacy

We had quite a long drive from the Smokies up through Tennessee, then diagonally across the state of Virginia to get to Appomattox Court House. We had originally hoped to visit Monticello as well, but given the length of the drive and the timing we opted to spend more quality time at Appomattox and not go an hour and a half out of our way to Monticello.

I did not realize that there was quite so much to Appomattox Court House National Historic Park. The small crossroads village had been turned into a sort of open air museum, with houses that replicated the scene (more or less) as it had been when Lee surrendered to Grant at the McLean farmhouse. It was nice, and a bit odd after all our time in remote areas to see a town. In all, it was done to much better effect than Harpers Ferry, which had felt frantic and jumbled and a bit commercial.

The Meeks store, foreground, with the McLean farmhouse back and to the left.

There were a few living history programs going on that day, and one of the volunteers spent quite a while orienting a group of visitors who were headed over to a program. She wanted to make very, very sure that the visitors knew that the living history reenactor wouldn't know that it's 2012, that they shouldn't ask questions about the Superbowl or modern things, that they should understand that he was stuck in 1865. It was a bit overdone; I have mixed feelings about total-immersion living history to begin with, and this reaffirmed many of them. As a theatrical performance it can provide a wonderful window into the past (ie one person shows of famous figures) but as an interactive program it can often frustrate and/or goad visitors.

The McLean farmhouse itself, though not much remains of its original structure, was definitely worth seeing. After seeing Matthews Hill at Manassas, where the war began, what seemed like weeks ago, we were now seeing the room in which it ended.

The McLean farmhouse.

Interior of the parlor. Lee sat at the marble-topped table to the left, Grant at the smaller table to the right.

Since we had no particular interest in seeing a reconstructed town and/or living history programs (living so close, as we do, to one of the best living history museums in the world, Old Sturbridge Village) we finished fairly quickly and headed over to the Museum of the Confederacy, which we'd noticed had just opened a new building right down the street from the park in April 2012.

I have to say, I have never felt outright uncomfortable in a museum before because of its point of view. Perhaps I've been naive until this moment, but I felt that the museum portrayed the Civil War from a bias that was so far from my own beliefs about the conflict that it was nearly hostile.

Entering the exhibit halls, starting with the reasons for war (emphasis on states' rights) and the excitement of going off to war.

It had wonderful collections, and some really engaging exhibits, but the story was decidedly Lost Cause, rather than Preserve the Union. There seemed little attempt to present both sides. Rather, words like "honor" and "romance" were used non-ironically to describe the actions of generals. I have been trying to remember if I noticed any mention at all of slavery. I don't think I did. There may  have been one or two side mentions, but nothing substantive.

In case you can't read it, here is the description of Appomattox and the Confederate decision to surrender:

How To Surrender?

At Appomattox, General Lee ran out of options.

The ranks of his proud army had thinned. The Federal army controlled the Southside Railroad at Appomattox Station, Lee's lifeline to supplies and successful retreat to North Carolina.

The question shifted from how to keep fighting to how to surrender.

Lee's foe offered an honorable answer.

 The exhibits continued on to describe Grant's offering of parole at Appomattox. I'm not sure Grant's decision had much to do with honor, more with practicality. Nothing in this label is wrong. In fact, I think it's a pretty good example of label writing: succinct, descriptive, informative. I just find it a bit uncomfortable to use words like "proud" and "honorable" in this context. Is it just because my point of view is being challenged? Is there actually a troubling characterization here? I've thought about this for some time, and I'm still not sure.