what I have learned from my adventures so far

Hello readers. As you know, one of my topics this summer will be my adventures On the Road as I seek out research opportunities and battlefield perspectives for my project. Also I may attempt to come up with a title for said project, as just now it is still called That Thing I am Supposed to be Writing, or A Queer-er Retelling of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Only in the Civil War. Neither of which, it must be said, is much of a title. So next week I will likely be posting about a Serious UB Topic (the upcoming new bookstore, the innumerable ways in which UB parking continues to make my brain hurt, how much I love the MFA program, gender-neutral bathrooms, etc.), but this week... This week I am going to tell you about Fredericksburg VA.

Some Civil War battlefields, like Sharpsburg, are remote enough from civilization (except the tacky people who refuse to move from their 70s vintage house & above ground pool, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLEFIELD!!!) that you can stand there and listen to the birds and have quite a sense of the scope of things. Also, there are a lot of very helpful plaques and memorials and things to show one where everything happened. At Gettysburg, you can stand by the tree line at the bottom of the hill and look up and see what Lee and Longstreet would have seen (and you can wonder why in the name of God anyone would have thought sending Pickett up the hill was a good idea...).

But at Fredericksburg... At Fredericksburg there is development gone wild. And this, dear readers, is really the point of this post. Not so much that I am cheerfully driving hither and yon to do my research (although I am deliriously happy that I will be spending the last third of June in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee), but that one of the failings of Those who Came Before Us was that they didn't preserve things. In Fredericksburg, the main in-town battlefield is covered in houses, so you look down from the ridge where the 35th North Carolina Infantry (the regiment to which my character is attached) would have stood, and instead of seeing 600 yards of empty ground, and imagining the Union troops pouring across it and the resultant awful carnage, and the small city and the frozen Rappahannock beyond, all you see is a bunch of houses.

At the Wilderness, also part of the Fredericksburg cluster of protected battlefields, they are about to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter right at the edge of the battlefield. I suspect this may impinge somewhat on authenticity. Also, there are already TEN Wal-Marts in the Fredericksburg metro area, such as it is.

As a Civil War scholar of sorts, I find this utterly appalling and unacceptable. But as a person who cares about history -- mine, yours, the city's, the country's, whatever -- I find it heartbreaking.

Here in Baltimore we have a lot of the same problem going on. The Maritime Museum downtown, which includes the Coast Guard cutter, and the Lighthouse, and the submarine, and a few other exhibits, is likely to fail soon, because even before the Recession their revenues were so bad, and the City government doesn't do much for them. The Edgar Allan Poe House is hard to find, and not all that well maintained. We're about to lose the Preakness. The crabs and oysters are dying, and with them, the skipjacks and their captains are going to die out. Baltimore's Arabbers (the produce pony people) are vanishing, even though we are the only city who still has them at all. There are dozens of other examples.

One of the amazing things about going to school here in Baltimore is that you are surrounded by history. And yet, all of these places and people and things will GO AWAY if you don't make a point of fighting for the parts you love. Surprisingly few of Baltimore's historic buildings have landmark status. The produce ponies have no home.

I implore you, as one scholar to another: Find something in Baltimore that you think is completely, utterly special, something that defines the city for you, or that you know you won't find anyplace else, and help it succeed. Join it, donate to it, volunteer for it, write about it... Do something. Please.