And the Inner Harbor lacks that. It's been pasteurized. All the impurities have been removed. It's become like everywhere else. Civil War battlefields present travel guides with a dilemma.
Battlefields are popular stops along travelers' routes.
They're also reminders of America at its worst, remnants of a miserable quake along the country's deepest fault-line. Explaining the death and wounding of 23,000 Americans in a single day of battle, as was the case at Antietam near Sharpsburg, in west-central Maryland, can be tricky. Antietam, in travel guides, is a stop between a mall and a restaurant, not a pilgrimage to some wrath-whipping ground zero. The downside is that troop movements are studied by the visitor, monuments and cannons are photographed, Gen. Robert E. Lee's failed attempt to take the war into the North and Lincoln's decision to deliver the Emancipation Proclamation as a result are pondered, but all in their place, segregated from any connection with the present. A visit to a place like Antietam reveals how we have learned to face the past much more courageously than the way we face the present.