The Battle of Gettysburg

Before the Battle of Gettysburg, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was "of no importance and no consequence: like Waterloo (where Napoleon was defeated) it was illuminated by the sheer war. The essence of war is accident," Arthur C. Danto writes eloquently, in an otherwise bloodthirsty apologia of an essay titled "Gettysburg."

The battle itself happened as a kind of accident. The commanding Confederate general Robert E. Lee had happened upon the town on July 1, 1863, when fellow General James Longstreet rode up beside a stationary, horse-backed Lee and espied through his binoculars the gathered Union soldiers between the town's two great ridges. Longstreet proposed going around and behind, cutting the Union off from reinforcements that could move in from D.C. "No," said Lee, "the enemy is there and I am going to attack him there." Those words and that decision proved famous, fateful, and fatal.

The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of the war, the battle in which it became clear that Union forces would prevail. 50,000 men lost their lives on the battlefield that day, the bloodiest in the entire war.

Gerald Early on Jazz

Gerald Early's essay "Passing of Jazz's Old Guard," published in a 1985 issue of Kenyon Review, is an excellent education in jazz. Ostensibly, it is a profile of and elegy to those artists who have brought the artform to public consciousness. Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Stitt get namechecked in the subtitle. But most important of all is the education the essay gives you.

A jazz enthusiast himself, Early wants you to check out these artists. There's Mingus, Monk, and Stitt, but have you have heard Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Wilbur Ware? Read the essay, and you'll learn of them, too, and many others. Of course, Mingus, Monk, and Stitt are held up by Early, because Early regards these figures as paragons of the form. And for his purposes, a study of their lives shows the difficulties of the prototypical jazz musician.

The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The United States military dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9 respectively in the year 1945. Since that time, the most destructive event in world history has been reduced to a black-and-white image of a mushroom cloud. The decision to drop the bombs was ostensibly to avoid sending in ground troops. The same sort of justification is used today for drones.

In a 1985 essay in the Nation titled "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters," Kai Erikson writes that one of the frightening aspects regarding the decision of the United States armed forces to drop atomic bombs on Japan was that even its main actors were disclaiming responsibility for the decision even as they were acting.

Donald Barthelme on Writing

 

Writer Donald Barthelme in his essay "Not-Knowing" says the writer not knowing what he or she is on about when he or she starts writing is crucial to the process. The process of writing is built around honed intuition, and for the writer, it all might as well be magic.

In this same essay on craft, Barthelme worries about many other things besides. One is the shrinking audience for literature. Another is the competition with TV and film. And still another is the possibility that the contemporary writer might have finally arrived at the point where there is not much more to do by way of art. Most of Barthelme's essay focuses on this latter issue.

Freedom and the American Revolution

The most curious fact about the American Revolution is that it happened at all. Historian Gordon Wood says that in the traditional sense, "Americans were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century." Even to many of its international observers, the revolution seemed a rebellion with little cause.

Perhaps, though, the cause of revolution ought not present itself as such a mystery, for it would appear that what brought about the American Revolution had to do with the conditions of the New World. The New World had given Americans the experience of what it was like to have to forge ahead in free circumstances. The Americans therefore "revolted not to create but to maintain their freedom," Wood says. "While the speculative philosophers of Europe were laboriously searching their minds in an effort to decide the first principles of liberty, the Americans had come to experience vividly that liberty in their everyday lives."