1/8: On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain by Ronald C. White (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Fields-Unlikely-Lawrence-Chamberlain/dp/0525510087/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1707433634&sr=1-1
Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College.
1913 Gettysburg reunion
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is |
| 0:05.2 | This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bachelor. |
| 0:09.7 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.0 | It is the winter of 1848. |
| 0:15.0 | Brunswick, Maine, Bowdoin College, |
| 0:18.0 | a young man, his name is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, called Lawrence, |
| 0:22.0 | stands before the faculty. |
| 0:24.8 | The test is to enter a Bowdoin late, this is the second term. |
| 0:29.5 | And he's prepared for this all his life. |
| 0:32.3 | I welcome Ronald White. He's the author of a new |
| 0:36.0 | biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain entitled on Great Fields the Life and |
| 0:41.2 | Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain called |
| 0:45.2 | Lawrence. Ron a very good evening to you thank you very much and |
| 0:49.9 | congratulations that moment Lawrence was standing before a faculty. He could only dream of |
| 0:56.7 | being a member of the Bowdoin College. I think there were more than 100 students at the |
| 1:00.6 | time. There were eight faculty members. What is it that they were |
| 1:04.3 | asking him to do? How did he perform that day? And what does it mean about his |
| 1:10.1 | skill that he could memorize at that length. |
| 1:13.4 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:15.0 | Good evening. |
| 1:16.4 | Well, this was a classical education. |
| 1:18.6 | And so yes, as you suggest, he was asked to say from memory some of the classics of Greek and Roman literature as well as saying in Greek from the New Testament. |
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