[ot-caption title=”Pine Crest students listened to the insight of Dr. Gallman, Dr. Sacher, and Dr. Engle regarding the impact of the American Civil War (via, Jack Steinberg, sophomore)” url=”https://pcpawprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ici.jpg”]

On Monday, March 9th, Pine Crest Upper School students gathered in the Institute for Civic Involvement Auditorium to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.  The importance of this date in our history cannot be overstated, as it ushered in the end of slavery, the destruction of the Confederacy, and the beginning of the Reconstruction era. Three speakers, Dr. Gallman, Dr. Sacher, and Dr. Engle, participated in a symposium to discuss the extraordinary legacy of the Civil War.

The audience was captivated from the very beginning when Dr. Gallman, a history professor at University of Florida, presented documents dating back to the 1860s that explained the emotions, relationships, and daily activities of civilians during the Civil War. In particular, Dr. Gallman shared diary entries from Emile Davis, an African American woman from Philadelphia, who, from 1863-1865, recorded all of her personal experiences in three different diaries that have all survived until today. Additionally, Dr. Gallman chillingly discussed propaganda that was used to recruit single black men for the war in return for “manhood.”

Next, Dr. Sacher, the history department chair at the University of Central Florida, discussed the enormity of the war’s impact on the United States . “It was the only time in history where the country rejected the president [Abraham Lincoln],” Dr. Sacher said. He equated the Civil War with  WWI and WWII in order to emphasize the scope of the devastation in the United States. Many Pine Crest students were surprised to learn that 633,000 Americans died during the Civil War.

To conclude the 2015 Civil War Symposium, Dr. Engle, a history professor at Florida Atlantic University, addressed the varied and complicated perspectives of people throughout the United States during this period. Dr. Engle stated that “historians give sight to the past,” and discussed the hundreds of Civil War era newspapers he had gathered from all over America to explain the Civil War through the eyes of Americans as they lived through it.

The ICI symposium helped Pine Crest students understand  how the Civil War continues to shape our society. The students were enthralled by the speakers’ presentations, and gained new and extremely valuable insights into the most deadly war in American history.