Additional Assignments

1. Imagine that you are a commanding officer in the Confederate army, writing a letter to the mother of a soldier in your unit who was killed in the battle. Using the evidence from the documents, what would you say in the letter? Now write the same letter from the perspective of a commanding officer in the Union army to the mother of a Union soldier killed in the battle. How do the two letters differ? What similarities do they have?
2. Prepare a class presentation that examines the strengths and limitations of using period photographs to study the Civil War battlefield, Gettysburg included. Drawing from the Civil War archive at the Library of Congress, assemble a set of at least ten images that describe some part of the Civil War battle experience. Your presentation should include text that interprets the images for viewers, drawing attention to both what is included and excluded.