Month: September 2015

Entry 20: The Unplayable 1864

Posted on by Christian McWhirter

Civil War Generals 2: Grant, Lee, Sherman. Designed by  Douglas Gonya.

Release Date: October 31, 1997.

Available Here

There are a lot of Civil War games out there. I’ve only played a few but I spent an enormous amount of time with one of the best: Civil War Generals 2: Grant, Lee, Sherman. When I discovered this game, I was at the height of my love affair with the epic military narrative I described in my last post, so being able to lead my forces through almost all of the war’s major engagements certainly scratched the right itch. But that’s not really what I want to talk about here, nor do I want to discuss how it possesses many of the same historical and moral problems I covered in my review of Ultimate General: Gettysburg. Revisiting CWG2 for this blog, one aspect stood out like a sore thumb: the strange way it ends. Read More

Ken Burns Made Me A Civil War Historian

Posted on by Christian McWhirter

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first airing of Ken Burns’s The Civil War. My original plan was to mark the occasion with a review (or series of reviews) because I have lots of opinions on it (for instance, I both agree and disagree with Kevin Levin’s recent article). Unfortunately, I don’t have time to watch it again and it’s been too long since my last viewing for me to write a proper entry. I’ll get to that someday, but today I want to say a little about my personal relationship with the film. For me, The Civil War isn’t just any documentary–it directly inspired me to pursue American history as a career. Read More

Entry 19: Lincoln Begins

Posted on by Christian McWhirter

 

The Better Angels. Written and directed by A. J. Edwards.

Release Date: November 7, 2014.

“The short and simple annals of the poor”; this is how Abraham Lincoln described his childhood (quoting Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”) and A. J. Edwards apparently believes him. Edwards’s debut film, The Better Angels, begins by establishing the contrast between Lincoln’s humble roots and the eventual heights he would reach–letting us hear the sound of a frontier river (probably Pigeon Creek) before presenting several imposing shots of the Lincoln Memorial. The river is a good metaphor: it is part of the rustic uncivilized world but always moving forward, just like Lincoln as he moved from rural Indiana to the pinnacle of the American social ladder. Read More