Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avrogate.

This day, June 25, 1913, the first of over 50,000 veterans begin returning to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the largest reunion of Civil War soldiers.

It's a multi-day event taking place on the battlefield itself

full of speeches and reunions and camping and plenty of revisionist history. A lot of

it centered around the so-called Lost Cause mythology that the South had fought justly and

heroically. So here to discuss the Great Union of 1913 and how history gets reworked in real time

is, as always, Nicole Nicole Hammer of Columbia. Hello

Jody. And back for episode two of a three episode run is Jane

Kosten of Vox and the Weeds and lots more. Hello,

Hello, thanks so much for having me.

So this great reunion, 1913,

everyone gathered back at Gettysburg.

Nicky, what was the goal here?

Was it get together and swap stories, or was there kind of a larger historical reckoning going on?

I mean there was a huge historical reckoning going on here you had a nation that had been driven by civil war and now you're coming back to the battlefield years later and having certain people who were engaged in that fight coming back.

You have United States soldiers meeting with Confederate soldiers in a kind of

healing ceremony of a sort and we'll get into the complicated nature of that healing

but it was about this moment of overcoming the divisions of the Civil War.

That was a big, a big goal.

Yeah, and it's interesting because what you see was fought over is

how effective lost cause mythology in some ways

...