Learn about America’s changing view of veterans
(Illustration/Humanities Washington)
When I was still a staff writer at The Spokesman-Review, I was able to turn my lifelong interest in books and movies into an actual career. Lucky me.
Over the near-three decades that I worked at the SR, I interviewed dozens of writers. One that I particularly enjoyed was with Jeff Shaara.
I had been familiar with Shaara’s father, Michael Shaara, because I had read the elder man’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Killer Angels.” The novel is an in-depth, imaginative yet fact-based study of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg.
Years after the elder Shaara died, Jeff Shaara took to writing and penned a number of novels in the same style of his father’s. Those books include “Gods and Generals” and “The Last Full Measure,” which are – respectively – a prequel and then sequel to “The Killer Angels.”
The title of that latter book comes from the speech that Abraham Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg in 1863, a little more than four months following the battle. Part of the address is as follows:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain …”
Those lines came to me this morning as I considered an online event, sponsored by Humanities Washington, titled “Sometimes Heroes: America’s Changing Relationship with Its Veterans.” Held in conjunction with the Cowlitz County Historical Museum, the talk is part of an ongoing series of lectures by Jeb Wyman, a professor at Seattle Central College.
As the Humanities Washington website declares, “This presentation examines America’s relationship to wars and veterans over the last century, and what shapes our current national consciousness toward veterans and the wars they fight in our name.”
Click here to register. And then find copies of the Shaara books. They’re well worth reading.