Lunch & Learn: Telling the Story of Antietam

Program registration is recommended but not required.

The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1864, was the single bloodiest day of the American Civil War with 23,000 casualties. How do you go about telling the story of such a huge, tragic, and significant event? In this talk, D. Scott Hartwig will discuss how he did this in his book, I Dread the Thought of the Place, and how good history, with its depth and richness, helps us to think critically, and see things as they are and not how we would like them to be.

D. Scott Hartwig was the supervisory park historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, retiring in 2014 after a 34-year career in the National Park Service, nearly all of it spent at Gettysburg. He won the regional Freeman Tilden Award for excellence in interpretation in 1993, and was a key player for the design of all aspects of the current Gettysburg museum/visitor center. He is the author of To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign from September 3 to September 16, published in September 2012 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and of I Dread The Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and End of the Maryland Campaign, also published by Johns Hopkins in August 2023. The latter title won the 2024 Barksdale Award, Emerging Civil War Book Award, and was one of two books which received honorable mention for the American Battlefield Trust 2024 History Prize.

ASL interpretation will be available for attendees.

Presented in partnership with The Maryland State Archives and The Maryland Four Centuries Project.