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The readers comments to the effect that professor Carmichael, a critic of reenactments and reenactors is a Marxist, are revealing.

Assuming the description to be true, we have the application of The Frankfurt School brought to the sacred battlegrounds of Gettysburg. The Marxists seek to control history, the way we study history, the conclusions we draw from history, and, ultimately, the way we think about the world. The Critical Theory is an attempt to so disparage what we think we know and how we know it so that we are eventually prepared psychologically for a a new worldview conveniently supplied to us courtesy of Marxism.

We conservatives have largely lost these battles in the kindergartens, grammar schools, middle schools, high schools and universities of America so it is not surprising that the struggle to indoctrinate has moved to a real battleground.

Bingo!

Assuming the description to be true, we have the application of The Frankfurt School brought to the sacred battlegrounds of Gettysburg. The Marxists seek to control history, the way we study history, the conclusions we draw from history, and, ultimately, the way we think about the world

Nailed it.

When that thing about Doris Kearns Goodwin hit, I got into a BIG argument with a Liberal friend (yes, I have one or two) who's involved in national Dem politics over it. The points he made consisted of drawing an analogy between reenactors/battlefied study playing with green army men, saying that you can't divorce political history from military history and that it's necessary to connect history to events today (IOW Gettysburg is all about gay rights) in order to make them relevant. Pretty pathetic. He didn't like it very much when I told him he needed to get a real job that didn't involve using 1984 as a how-to manual ...

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

- George Santayana

I figure he is jealous. Rather than develop an understanding of how historical weapons work, what it took to load, fire, carry them, understand their lethality, he wants people to spend their money on his latest book that will tell them what he as an historian has determined they should know about that subject.

Some people think history is a study of the past. Marxists think history is what they tell people.

Posted on the story:

"I know Pete Carmichael. I worked under him briefly when he was first appointed to an associate professorship at Western Carolina University in the late 1990s. I was a first year graduate student. He is an admitted Marxist historian...that means that his entire understanding of history is through a Marxist interpretation. Of course, he states that he personally isn't a Marxist--I asked him how a person can interpret the entirety of history from a Marxist perspective, how their entire understanding of everything is based on the Marxist dialectic and yet you are not a subscriber and supporter of Marx? He could never answer the question. I'll tell you his problem, he is firstly a Marxist and resents competing interpretations of history.

"Secondly, he is threatened that so many of these reenactors know more about history than he and his little clique of academic buddies. God forbid anyone question the ivory tower crowd and their school of exclusivity. I think that a lot of people would be shocked if they could spend a little time in the halls of most any university graduate school--particularly history departments. They are little hives of leftist Marxist activism. I consider them dangerous having survived one myself."