Gabor Boritt: Plowing Hallowed Ground ... The Gettysburg Address, Word by Word
The main text of Gabor Boritt’s new Lincoln book concludes on Page 206. So more than half of this 415-page volume is devoted to appendices, acknowledgments, bibliography, index and so on. That might be regarded as padding if Professor Boritt’s obsession with his subject matter were not so unwavering.
He has written or edited more than a dozen books about the Civil War and is the director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. He lives on an exquisitely situated Gettysburg farm near Cemetery Ridge and about a mile from the site of Pickett’s Charge. “The Gettysburg Gospel” includes a picture of the farm too.
Is this scholarship, or is it everything but the kitchen sink? Both. But it adds up to fascinating monomania. As Professor Boritt well knows, the hallowed ground of Gettysburg has been much stampeded by generations of experts, and Lincoln fever rages now more than ever. New turf simply does not exist.
So he has chosen to focus on one crucial moment in this president’s history and examine it from every angle. He seeks to capture the atmosphere in which the Gettysburg Address was delivered, the changing meaning of the speech over time, the minutiae that surround its provenance and the amazing ways in which it has been garbled, misquoted and willfully misunderstood.
He has the background and authority to make “The Gettysburg Gospel” as interesting to Civil War experts as it will be to neophytes. Professor Boritt’s bona fides include blurbs from Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns. Conspicuously missing: Garry Wills, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” would seem to have fully covered every aspect of the speech and its delivery.
But Professor Boritt has the temerity to suggest that there is more to be said, and that Mr. Wills’s interpretation is at times excessively scholarly. While expressing great admiration for Mr. Wills’s analysis of the Gettysburg Address, he places it at one end of the spectrum....
Read entire article at Janet Maslin in the NYT
He has written or edited more than a dozen books about the Civil War and is the director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. He lives on an exquisitely situated Gettysburg farm near Cemetery Ridge and about a mile from the site of Pickett’s Charge. “The Gettysburg Gospel” includes a picture of the farm too.
Is this scholarship, or is it everything but the kitchen sink? Both. But it adds up to fascinating monomania. As Professor Boritt well knows, the hallowed ground of Gettysburg has been much stampeded by generations of experts, and Lincoln fever rages now more than ever. New turf simply does not exist.
So he has chosen to focus on one crucial moment in this president’s history and examine it from every angle. He seeks to capture the atmosphere in which the Gettysburg Address was delivered, the changing meaning of the speech over time, the minutiae that surround its provenance and the amazing ways in which it has been garbled, misquoted and willfully misunderstood.
He has the background and authority to make “The Gettysburg Gospel” as interesting to Civil War experts as it will be to neophytes. Professor Boritt’s bona fides include blurbs from Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns. Conspicuously missing: Garry Wills, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” would seem to have fully covered every aspect of the speech and its delivery.
But Professor Boritt has the temerity to suggest that there is more to be said, and that Mr. Wills’s interpretation is at times excessively scholarly. While expressing great admiration for Mr. Wills’s analysis of the Gettysburg Address, he places it at one end of the spectrum....