From Pasadena Star News: Major Civil War exhibit opens at Huntington Library in San Marino
SAN MARINO - Marking
the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, a major exhibition of
200 rare photographs and manuscripts from The Huntington Library's
collection will open to the public on Saturday.
"A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory
in the American Civil War" will run through Jan. 14 in the MaryLou and
George Boone Gallery.
A companion exhibition, "A Just Cause: Voices of the American
Civil War," featuring handwritten letters and writings by Abraham
Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, among others, will be on view through Jan. 7
in the library's West Hall.
Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington
Library, said earlier that much scholarly research has rightly been
devoted to the military, tactical and heroic elements of the war. But,
she said, both new exhibits take a different path into understanding the
personal toll of a war that caused the deaths of what historians now
estimate as 750,000 Americans.
Using images with the "overarching topic of death and
mourning," the exhibit brings together what Watts said was a large and
"longtime hidden" photographic trove scattered around the Huntington.
Much of it has never been on public view before, she said.
Images include scenes from the Battle of Antietam, described
as the bloodiest and costliest single day of combat in American history;
Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the nationwide mourning and the
conspirators' hanging; and theestablishment of Gettysburg National Monument as a site of reconciliation and healing.
Showing the human cost, Watts said, are many "wrenching" personal stories and images.
Olga Tsapina, the Huntington's curator of American historical
manuscripts and curator, said the companion exhibit takes an
"unflinching" look at the realities of the war.
It uses photographs, letters, diaries, posters (including a
rare "Wanted" poster from the Lincoln assassination) and other documents
from the Huntington's vast Civil War collections.
"A lot of it is personal experience, personal letters or
political discourses, including sermons, speeches in Congress,
interviews, public statements," Tsapina said. "We're trying for balance"
on the Union and Confederate sides."
The debate always returned to slavery, she said, and the perceptions at the time that it was a "divinely inspired" institution.
The exhibit will try to convey how "important and how raw"
that debate was, Tsapina said, and how the country was bitterly divided
on the issue of free markets and the "unfair advantage of free slave
labor."
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical
Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, is closed on Tuesdays. Admission is free on
the first Thursday of each month with advance tickets. For more
information call 626-405-2100 or visit huntington.org.
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