Civil War

T he Thatcher Perkins has come a long way since the winter day in 2003 when it lay under tons of snow, slate, wood, cast iron and other debris, after half of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum's roof gave way in a record snowstorm. The Presidents Day weekend roof collapse caused $15 million in damage to the museum's collection of historic locomotives, rolling stock and other rail artifacts - and the Perkins was a woeful sight. It sustained major cab damage, with its boiler dented and pierced.

An 89-year-old Arizona man worried that no one showed interest in a U.S. flag hand-stitched by his grandmother and her mother 150 years ago. By chance, his concerns found their way to the Maryland Historical Society, where a curator said her eyes filled with tears as she gently unwrapped the rare, homemade 34-star flag that flew above a West Baltimore street during the Civil War. "I had this feeling this was something special, extraordinary," said...

Local archaeologists have not only confirmed that Baltimore's Lafayette Square Park was once the stomping ground of a Civil War army barracks, but they also dug up a little-known fact about the soldiers who dwelled there: They had a knack for losing buttons. On Sunday, volunteers who joined the Baltimore Heritage and Archaeological Society of Maryland in searching for remnants at the former Union army encampment ended a three-day quest of exploring the park's history in the 19th century.

If Vietnam was the nation's first televised war, then the Civil War was the country's first photographed war, dramatically and vividly bringing into American homes the horrors and carnage their husbands, brothers and sons faced on the battlefield. In his recently published book, "Maryland's Civil War Photographs The Sesquicentennial Collection," Ross J. Kelbaugh, a Pikesville collector of vintage Maryland images, has assembled more than 400 photographs of a conflict that killed more than 600,000 Americans between 1861 and 1865.

"It is not safe ... to trust $800 million worth of Negroes in the hands of a power which says that we do not own the property. ... So we must get out ... " — The Daily Constitutionalist, Augusta, Ga., Dec. 1, 1860 "[Northerners] have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery. ... We, therefore, the people of South Carolina ... have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and other States of North America dissolved. " — from "Declaration of the Causes of Secession" "As long as slavery is looked upon by the North with abhorrence ... there can be no satisfactory political union between the two sections.

Oct. 27-28 Maryland: "The Battlefield Embalmer: Preserving the Civil War Dead," a discussion at National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Frederick, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Historian James W. Lowry will discuss mortuary science during the war. For more information, call the museum at 301-695-1864. Nov. 2-Nov. 3 Pennsylvania: The Seminary Ridge Symposium will present "Battle: the Nature and Consequences of Civil War Combat," at Seminary Ridge, Gettysburg. Sponsored by the Seminary Ridge Historic Preservation Foundation.

Best bet There's no contest for what you should be watching tonight, as MPT begins re-running a nine-part series that constituted some of TV's finest hours."

Many school children have had to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but few adults know much about the events that inspired it, or the wellspring of emotion it provoked.That's because few -- other than historians -- have really examined the causes of the Civil War or thought deeply about its power in the making of the American character."The Civil War," an 11-hour PBS documentary aired last week, probably changed that. The producer, Ken Burns, calls it an American "Illiad." It's a good analogy, for sons and daughters of Hellene have long used that ancient epic to explain the essence of their hopes and dreams to others.