Charge on Gettysburg

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 30, 1999 | by Andrea Billups, | Gerald Mizejewski

Students and professionals are rushing to enroll in the college's new course of study.

More than 135 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, the Pennsylvania college located in the town where the Civil War clash occurred will offer a formal course of study on the famous event.

Starting this fall, the 2,200 students at Gettysburg College can sign up for an interdisciplinary minor in Civil War-era studies. The program is the first of its kind in the nation and follows a trend in recent years of renewed interest in the war between the North and the South.

"I think it's fair to say that interest is booming," says J. Matthew Gallman, the college's Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War era, who developed the degree program through a grant from the Luce Foundation. "Every day, somebody calls and asks if they can audit my courses."

Gallman, who is in his first year at Gettysburg College, is hard-pressed to answer why it took the 167-year-old school -- located a stone's throw from the revered battlefield -- so long to launch a study program that seems so logical and fitting. He not only receives inquiries about the program from students but also from professionals excited at the prospect of studying more closely a war romanticized for decades in books, film and television.

Jason Rose, a junior, was the first to sign up for the minor. A Civil War reenactor who works at the Gettysburg battlefield, he was disappointed at the slim course offerings at a school with a ringside seat to history. "I came to this college to study the Civil War," he says. "I thought, since this is Gettysburg, Civil War central, they should have more."

Soon they will. In addition to the minor in Civil War studies, the college will offer a program for students from other schools to live on campus for a semester of intensive study. The program will include field trips to battle sites in nearby states, including Bull Run in Manassas, Va., Harper's Ferry in West Virginia and Antietam in Maryland, where students will get a personal feel for the geography and culture of the area and the people who served and died in battle.

At Gettysburg, Confederate and Union troops suffered more than 51,000 casualties. Campus buildings in use today include a Civil War hospital where soldiers wounded in the 1863 battle were treated.

Although the programs have not yet officially begun, offers of support already are coming in from Civil War buffs around the nation, says Gallman. Officials at the Gettysburg National Battlefield have pledged to do their part by designing special tours for future classes.

But Leah Jewett, director of the U.S. Civil War Center at Louisiana State University, notes that the Internet has opened up access to resources about the war, creating a resurgence of interest as far away as Japan and Australia, where clubs for Civil War buffs have formed. Many today want to learn not just about battle strategy but also about the psychology of war and why the common man fought, she says.

"It still affects us in ways that maybe other wars have not," she says. "We still have problems with race. We still have problems with Southern states trying to build their economic base and educational system. There's so much left over from that era."

The Gettysburg programs will offer classes in a number of disciplines, including English and philosophy, designed to broaden not only students' knowledge of the Civil War but also individual educational goals, adds Gallman.

RELATED ARTICLE: National Labor College Graduates First Class

At first glance, it looked like any other college commencement, with dark gowns, tassels and gushing parents snapping photographs. But then the speakers offered some unique words of wisdom, such as, "I say to you all, solidarity, solidarity forever," and "May God bless the labor movement."

Under a tent on a stretch of open grass in Silver Spring, Md., the National Labor College graduated its first class in July. Eighty-eight men and women from as far away as California and Panama took home four-year bachelor's degrees.

The college, a correspondence school accredited by the state of Maryland, offers bachelor of arts degrees in seven disciplines, such as union governance and administration. It was established two years ago by the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions, replacing Antioch University, a degree program operated through the George Meany Center for Labor Studies.

The program enables workers to advance their skills as leaders in the labor movement. Students receive credit -- up to 90 quarter hours -- for their work and union experience over the years. The college requires 180 quarter hours of credit for graduation. Average tuition is $3,000 for union members, who make up the majority of the college's student body, and $8,000 a year for nonunion members.

Participants typically spend one to two weeks each year on campus at the George Meany Center and work independently the rest of the time, completing reading assignments, writing research papers and communicating with instructors by phone, mail and e-mail.