November 19th marked the 155th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln several months after the bloody battle of Gettysburg.

The president's speech, coming in at fewer than 300 words, was to dedicate the National Cemetery there.

In 2010, also on a November 19th, Brooke revisited the Civil War at a news event in a conversation with historian Adam Goodhart.

At the time, Goodhart was blogging the Civil War for the New York Times, we figured this week was as good a time as any to dip back into our archives for a conversation about a time hard to believe when our country

was fractured.

Here's Brooke.

Adam Goodhart, a historian and professor at Washington College, is the author of a blog

called Disunion.

It's subject, the American Civil War.

Blogs, of course, are a great vehicle for tracking news and views in the moment, but the Civil War,

for those who keep track of such things, has been over for nearly a century and a half.

No matter. Goodhart says there's much to appreciate in blogging the war via newspaper accounts day by day. It enables us to experience it almost like contemporaries.

The way that people experience history is not a sort of a sweeping view from 500 miles up where you see armies marching across the landscape.

The blog format, I think, lets people experience the history of the past one day at a time.

Something else you've never had to reckon with as a historian before was comments from readers. People are

re-fighting the old ideological battles of the 19th century in a way that Americans never seem to

tire of doing. There seems to be a big movement to connect the Tea Party to the Confederacy.

How did the war change journalism? Journalism changed the civil war before the

civil war changed journalism. By 1860, by the time of Lincoln's election, every major

newspaper in the country carried reports by Telegraph. The Telegraph, and just the proliferation of the media

in general, really created

sort of a national echo chamber that might be a little bit familiar to some people today.

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