The American Civil War Museum, which opens May 4, tells the story of the Civil War from an array of perspectives. By Gregory S. Schneider Gregory S. Schneider Reporter covering Virginia from the Richmond bureau Email Bio Follow April 26 RICHMOND — Sheets of rain pounded the towering glass walls of this city’s new American Civil War Museum as workers raced to finish preparations for its May 4 opening.
What’s different, though, is the story that they tell. Museum chief Christy Coleman, curator Cathy Wright and their staffs and contractors have set out with the grandest of ambitions to reframe the way visitors view this crucial part of American history and the way that past continues to reverberate.
“We . . . wanted people to walk into something that maybe disoriented their expectations of the Civil War story,” said John Murphy of Solid Light, the company that designed the exhibits. “We want to get away from the mythmaking and back to history,” said Coleman, who helped lead the creation of the new institution.
Even some of the most conventional artifacts have surprising stories. One of the last galleries, set in 1865 amid the fall of Richmond, displays a square Confederate battle flag. This flag happens to have been captured in Richmond by Tad Lincoln, the president’s young son, when they visited two days after the surrender in 1865. Tad is said to have waved it from a window of the White House on his birthday, shortly before his father was assassinated.
Take those statues and bolt a bronze plate to them reading “They fought to perpetuation the enslavement their fellow man. These statues were built to restore the culture of Southern hate.”
Lincoln the degenerate and his war of aggression killed 700,000 people or half of all Americans that have died in all wars. Psychopaths like Sherman and his March to the Sea fully show how sick and demented they all were. The cult of death, destruction and decrepitude.
that it was a mistake not to crush the South into submission?
YES, BY ALL MEANS LET'S REWRITE HISTORY. US HISTORY SOUNDS SOO SCARY.
Slavery. The war was about slavery. No matter how you slice it. It's slavery.
How long did schools in Richmond refer to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression”?
America, take 2. 🎬
Erasing history again..... if there is no reminders... history will repeat itself