Starting tonight, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is hosting a three-day conference titled, "Symposium on the 19th Century Press, The Civil War and Free Expression" and the public is invited. More than 40 presentations are planned on subjects including war correspondents under fire, a new source for understanding the Klu Klux Klan, the use of war pictures by the press and Ohio newspaper coverage of the border wars in the 1850s. This is the university's 17th conference on the 19th century press. It begins at 7 p.m. Thursday and concludes on Saturday at noon. .. :
Mel Poole, the current superintendent of Catoctin Mountain Park in Thurmont, Md, will assume the duties of interim superintendent at Gettysburg National Military Park on Nov. 23, according to the National Park Service. The announcement follows on the removal of long-time Gettysburg superintendent John Latscher from his job last month after investigators discovered more than 3.400 sexually explicit images on his computer. The investigation was triggered by 17 allegations of misconduct and possible criminal activity, but he was cleared of those allegations.
Re-enactors playing President Lincoln read the Gettysburg address and 200 soldiers fought four engagements in a state park just west of Las Vegas earlier this month. Canons fired and cavalry units rode through the dust to the delight of an audience of about 1,500. Reporter Erin Dostal captured the weekend of desert battles and ordinary camp life in her story for the Las Vegas Sun.
Congressional conferees have agreed to the largest ever, single-year allocation of $9 million for the Civil War Battlefield Preservation Program. It is included in the 2010 Fiscal Year Interior Appropriations Act Conference Report. The conference report is scheduled for a final vote in the House and Senate this week. Since its creation in 1999, the Preservation Program has, through matching grants, been used to protect more than 15,000 acres at 60 battlefields in 14 states. Civil War Preservation Trust President James Lighthizer applauded the action, saying, it comes at a critical time when 30 acres of battlefield land is being lost each day to development.
John Latschar, the controversial superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park, was removed from that position, effective Monday, by National Park Service officials, according to an article by Erin James in the York, Pa. Daily Record/Sunday News. She interviewed him today. Latschar, who held the job for 15 years, was investigated by the Department of Interior, whose agents seized the hard drive from his office computer that was found to contain explicit sexual material. Washington Post reporter Kimberly Kindy broke the story of the investigation on Monday. According to the Post story: "An internal Aug. 7 memo from an investigator to Daniel N. Wenk, the acting director of the National Park Service, details the discovery of the images on the computer hard drive that was seized by investigators. But the office of Mary L. Kendall, acting inspector general for the Department of the Interior, omitted details of the computer probe or
