Even History Changes

Leonard Ornstein ’94

I had my first “full circle” moment as a history teacher in the 1990s at the Museum of Natural History. I was with my students from Gompers High School in the Bronx on a field trip. We passed a painting showing explorer Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca on a hajj, and a student asked me what the painting was. I nearly cried. On a sixth-grade field trip to the museum, I had asked the same question of my teacher.

I had another full-circle moment in Richmond this year at the workshop “The South in American History,” sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Back in the 1990s, I was majoring in history at then-Mary Washington College. The make-or-break class for history students was History 299, a course on how to research and write. I decided to write on Gen. George H. Thomas − a Union general and Virginia native.

I was in Virginia, ground zero for the Civil War. I was in Fredericksburg, home to four major Civil War battlefields. It was the era of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, which resulted in a surge in the popularity of studying the conflict. This should have been an easy paper to write. That was not to be the case.

Thomas was not into self-promotion, and there were few books about him. Simpson Library owned a couple, but they were ancient. The bigger problem in researching him, though, was that in Virginia it was as if George H. Thomas had never existed. He was a Virginian who not only fought for the Union, but who had destroyed a Confederate Army. One of the North’s best commanders was a Southerner.

In Virginia, George H. Thomas was persona non grata. His own family turned his portrait to the wall, burned his letters, and never spoke to him again. I tried to do the man justice in my paper. Over time, I kept hoping someone would write his biography or that the Commonwealth would recognize his achievements. I understood why Robert E. Lee’s story of renouncing the Union was important to the history of the American South. I did not understand why George H. Thomas’ story of remaining faithful to the Union was not.

After graduation, I returned to New York, to teach, and I developed an intense interest in Asian studies. My career took me to Arizona, so I no longer visited the South. The OK Corral and Confucius replaced Chickamauga and Thomas.

Fast forward to 2011. After nearly eight years away from Virginia and study of the Civil War, the Gilder Lehrman Institute selected me for the June workshop at the University of Richmond. It was a chance to grow as an educator, see old Mary Washington friends, and even return to campus. I thought of George H. Thomas, and I wondered how History of the South might have changed in the 20 years since I took Professor William B. Crawley’s course.

I learned how the teaching of the Civil War has changed. The Civil War is not just the two voices − North and South. Today, the Civil War is about Union and Confederate and just as much about freedom and emancipation.

We visited Cold Harbor Battlefield, where interpreters told us how the script for the exhibits was different than it would have been 15 years earlier and included more perspectives. We visited the American Civil War Center, where director Christy Coleman told how the center gave three viewpoints: North, South, and African-American.

We didn’t visit only battlefields. We visited the Shelton house and got the civilian perspective. We visited a slave graveyard and got the African-American perspective.

After witnessing this major paradigm shift in the teaching and presentation of the American Civil War, I wondered if George H. Thomas was part of the change. I completed an assigned reading on Robert E. Lee that made a direct comparison between Lee’s action and that of Thomas. I had hope.

At the end of a whirlwind day studying the Civil War, we stopped at the Virginia Historical Society to see the exhibit An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia. I told the society’s director I had studied history at Mary Washington and had written a paper on George H. Thomas. With all the changes in how Virginia remembers the Civil War, I asked him, would Gen. Thomas finally get his due?

He asked me to follow him into the exhibit. There, in a display case, was the sword of Union Gen. George Henry Thomas, Virginian, the Rock of Chickamauga. I nearly cried. The circle was complete.

Former Madison Hall resident Leonard Ornstein ’94 lives with his wife, Jaime, and son, Adam, in Goodyear, Ariz., where he teaches high school history. He received a master of arts in social studies education from Lehman College, The City University of New York in 1999. Portions of this essay were published last summer in The Free Lance-Star.