The Chattanooga Civil War Round Table will hold its regular monthly meeting on Tuesday, May 20, 2008. The meeting is at 7 PM and will be held in the Millis-Evans Room of Caldwell Hall on the campus of the McCallie School. Enter the McCallie School campus on Dodds Avenue and follow the signs to the Academic Quadrangle.
University of Tennessee at Martin Professor Dr. Timothy B. Smith is the speaker. He will speak about the creation of the first five battlefield parks in our country, Chickamauga being the VERY FIRST.
This story is the subject of his just released book The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. The meeting is free and open to the public.
It is the Round Table’s pleasure to again be fortunate enough to welcome back to the speaker’s rostrum Dr. Timothy B. Smith. Besides being a fine historian and speaker, Dr. Smith’s dedication to his craft has resulted in the publication of still another important volume on the war and its battlefields.
This new volume, literally hot off the presses, is The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation. It is just now being shipped to stores by the publisher, the University of Tennessee Press.
In The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation, Dr. Smith looks at the impulses behind the veterans’ creation of the battlefields at Chickamauga, Antietam, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg, impulses that include the sentiments of reconciliation, brotherhood, and reunification and which resulted in arguably what are still today the best preserved of the war’s major battlefields.
He also looks at what it took to make these places realities and how while they are similar, each is unique in its own ways individually. The stars of the book are the colorful, driven, and dedicated former soldiers who, sometimes as members of Congress, pushed these battlefield parks into being and who are largely responsible for the legacy from which we benefit today and which we should strive to still carry forward. Dr. Smith will speak on the subject of his new book.
Dr. Timothy B. Smith, a Mississippi native, is a Historian and Professor at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is also the author of several volumes, including This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park and The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield.
A former park ranger at Shiloh National Military Park, Tim, his wife and daughter, live in Adamsville, Tennessee.