Across the Mason-Dixon Line.
Hello from Duncannon, PA! I had hoped to write a post last weekend after arriving in Harper’s Ferry, but alas, too many good friends in Baltimore distracted me from the task. A very nice problem to have. After two full days off, I pushed on into Union territory and eventually across the Mason-Dixon Line into my home state. I make those references only half-jokingly—one reason it’s taken me so long to write a post is that the last few weeks of hiking have given me much to think about with regard to contested Civil War memory, Lost Cause ideology and it’s unavoidable reverberations through our current political and physical landscape. As I hiked through the final few hundred miles of Virginia, through West Virginia and Maryland, then into Pennsylvania, I was listening to David Blight’s ‘Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory’—a fitting companion that opened my eyes to the quiet battle over the War’s meaning still unfolding throughout the valleys, ridge lines and gaps that the...