Civil War

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.

The vitriol is worse than I ever recall. Worse than the Palin-induced smarm of 2008. Worse than the Swift-boat lies of 2004. Worse, even, than the anything-goes craziness of 2000 and its ensuing bitterness. It's almost a civil war. I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won't even consider going out with Republicans, and vice versa. My email and Twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn't share with my granddaughter.

Regarding your editorial, "Libya Attacks: Romney has a point" (Sept. 13), there's no debate that freedom of speech is a core value that should be defended in the United States and supported around the world. The question in this case is the context. The obvious purpose of the film insulting Islam was to incite a strong reaction from radicals in the Middle East. Why else would it have been put on the Internet? Those who distributed the film did so for reasons of hate, and this was rightly condemned by President Barack Obama.

When Maryland Public Television debuts "The Heart of the Civil War" on Sept. 11, it will showcase many Carroll County sites. The hour-long documentary features areas like Westminster and Uniontown and battlefields that were critical to both sides in the war between the states. The film includes footage of the most crucial territories where Confederate and Union forces battled for strategic advantage in Carroll, Frederick and Washington counties. The story focuses on Maryland residents enmeshed in the famous battles, whose sites still draw hundreds of tourists annually.

The hulking old tanks, left to rust when Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, still packed a threat when Albert Whittington arrived. Whittington, an ordnance and explosives specialist with the Baltimore district of the Army Corps of Engineers, clambered through dozens of Red Army tanks, trench-digging vehicles, bridge-laying equipment and other derelict machinery at the Pul-e-Charki military base east of Kabul. His mission: Find any unexploded ordnance, unused ammunition and other materials still capable of maiming or killing.

At the height of the Civil War, a Union soldier climbed into the dome of the State House in Annapolis and described the scene around it, a sea of white tents spreading in every direction. The tents were home to thousands of soldiers captured by the Confederates and returned to the Union army. They would wait in Camp Parole until recalled to service or sent home. In a letter home, another infantryman described the dire conditions in the crowded camp and called the state capital "a low, dirty place.

Today's decision by Russia and China to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on the brutal regime in Syria is, at most, a hollow victory for President Bashar Assad. Russian officials say they opposed the measure for fear that it would lead to regime change, possibly with the assistance of western military forces, as in Libya. But given the events on the ground this week in Syria, the veto appears likely only to ensure that regime change comes through blood and chaos, not diplomacy.

Letter writer David Brandenburg recently expressed an alternative view about a war that some call the "second war of American independence" ("The truth about the War of 1812," June 30). Mr. Brandenburg makes a number of interesting points that need a thoughtful response. He criticizes The Baltimore Sun for ignoring and "misrepresenting the historical facts" while not putting "the War of 1812 in its proper context. " The proper context is many fold. Influential figures in Britain wanted to maintain maritime supremacy, so they forcibly recruited American sailors into the Royal Navy, passed British legislation and set up blockades to restrict American trade and armed American Indians, making some Americans demand war. He then says the media is neither telling the "true nature of war" nor the reasons for going to war but is just telling about heroic soldiers, which lets the myth of the "good war" continue.

In his column ("Sailabration brings out the mobs," June 19), Dan Rodricks resoundingly endorses the content of a letter submitted to Archbishop William E. Lori by local Catholic Jeff Ross, to protest plans to include a quote from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in a forthcoming evening Mass. The quote in question implores Confederate soldiers to ask God's aid in their effort to defend the Old South's liberties and her cause. Mr. Ross declares the preservation of slavery an inextricable element of those liberties and that cause, and he opines that "slavery is the institution that Lee labored to preserve.

On the 200th anniversary of the U.S. declaration of war on Britain and its colonies, representatives of the United States, Britain and Canada gathered at Fort McHenry to sign a "declaration of peace. " "Much … has changed in 200 years," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told a crowd of politicians, diplomats and military leaders Monday. "Today, we stand together as inseparable friends, as we have for decades. We work together. We advance together. We fight together. " The War of 1812 was the last conflict among the United States, Britain and Canada.