With the aforementioned issues (mostly) resolved, KHF begins our two week Multistate Trek. We will soon be departing for Elizabethtown for the Hardin County History Museum. Unfortunately, we will have little Internet access until we arrive in Illinois. Meanwhile, ensure to check back with us on Friday evening for an update and photos of Elizabethtown, Bardstown, and Hodgenville! As we undertake this vast journey of numerous miles, it is natural to rely on music to ease the travel; the American Civil War - the primary theme of our MST - produced innumerable pieces which both evoke an inutterable sorrow and express a wondrous jubilee (the original meaning of which we may speak of later, with Henry Clay Work's Marching Through Georgia.) The rapturous reaping of lives spanning 1861-1865 has been reminiscingly known as, "The songiest war that ever was"; these varying compositions were not merely tools with which the common footsoldier could soothe his (or in rare instances, her) anguishing sorrows, but rather also speak to an ever shifting sociopolitical atmosphere. It has been noted that, "In 1861 Americans went to war singing Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!; they would never do so again." Whilst the conflict temporarily vanquished, for some, the heinous conceptions of romaniticism, the idea once more wrapped its fatal grip upon the common mind of Europeans (1914) and inevitably Americans (1918) upon the eruption of a tumultuous First World War. This bellicosity, so great that more men perished in the Battle of the Somme than in the entirety of the American Civil War, likewise produced multiple soul-wrenching and patriotically stirring songs. Due to the incredibly short involvement of the United States, a majority of such pieces are of British origin -- such as There's a Long, Long Trail A'Winding or It's A Long Way to Tipperary. Indeed, our contemporary minds often utilize the social outcries of song in our own memory, staging such performances as a 20th century television broadcast The Blue and the Grey: A Nation Remembers in Song or British musical movie O! What a Lovely War from which spring moving lyrical masterpieces - i.e. Battle Hymn of the Republic - and comical skits - i.e. When This Lousy War is Over. As we eagerly await our arrival in Springfield, it seemed fitting to simultaneously share some of the most well known of the aforesaid with our treasured Readers. Below we have inserted some selections from Great Songs from the Great War. - Austin R. Justice, History of Kentucky Group.
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Hi, I'm the website Admin. I look after the website as well as the chapter social media accounts. Austin R. Justice
PMC of River Cities Chapter and Lincoln Forum & Colloquium Student Scholar. Adjunct ContributorsSpencer M. Dayton Archives
April 2016
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