pictured. i wish i knew more about them. i do think we should have those conversations and how you should be careful studying things like that and writing about things like that and i do talk like that in the book about how careful we all should be, not only when looking at these body pictures or talking about the body pictures but the way we describe war. and the way we describe battlefields, all of that i think is part of that language that brings people in and they like to read these books and like to read these descriptions but what else are we doing? it's a really important conversation we're having so thank you for asking that uestion. all right. i hear we're out of time. so i want to thank you all for coming out this morning to hear the talk. and we're going on. applause platts

[applause] >> all right, y'all, thank you so much, judy. we have a 15-minute break and please be back here at 9:45 for kent masterson brown and his talk on george gordon immediate and the gettysburg campaign. 9:45. thank you so much. >> you're watching live coverage of the gettysburg civil war institute annual summer conference here on

c-span 3's american history tv. we'll be back live in just over 10 minutes with author and historian kent masterson brown who will talk about union commander george gordon mead and the gettysburg campaign, until then more on the civil wars c-span city's tour that ooks at cities across america. >> today we are in casco bay, one mile off the mainland shore of portland, maine, and we're on hog island ledge where they built fort gorgeous in 1858 to help defend portland harbor and was completed in 1865 and was built with two sister forts off to the south there, fort prebble in the south and fort scammel on house island and

designed to work in conjunction to defend the war. they think it was a civil war fort before it was funded long before civil war and approved by congress as a response to 1812, things that occurred much earlier. gorgeous is a handmade granite fort and if you looked at it from a top view looking down, you'd see a gigantic d. what most people don't realize is fort gorgeous, just like a d, is open in the middle and has this wonderful parade ground and there are people that have grown up here their entire lives and never have been here and think it's a solid structure. the fort was named after sir fernando gorges who was the colonial pripetor for the state of maine and told he never sat foot here but was an appointment. the design was modeled after a lot of the forts built at that time. fort sumpter, a big difference made out of brick and this all

gigantic blocks of granite and to think they came in here on a sailing vessel and unloaded that stuff, moved it around and then erected this entire structure by hand with dereks and block and tackle, it's just amazing. two levels designed to hold 3610-inch rodman guns, one sally port where troops could come and go and originally the sally port had one massive gate and a secondary gate. if you were standing in the parade ground looking back at the sally port, you'd see the rooms to the north of the sally port where there were quarters and rooms to the south side were more utility rooms. the vegetation you see never was designed to be here. the dirt was put here to absorb cannon fire and year after year seedlings, birds, what have you, grass began to sprout and if you see photos as recently as 50 years ago, there's just

grass here. 25 years ago, bushes and here we are today we have over here a 15-foot maple tree behind me to the left. here we are on the second floor in the case mates on the east, southeast side and if you look up, you'll see these transfer cracks that we're finding in this area. they only exist in this one area of the fort. again, this is partially because of the dirt up top and lack of drainage and probably after 150 years some settling happening in the inner and outer walls. on the floor, you can see these outlines of where a metal track would have been mounted to these studs that still remain. and on that track, the rear end of a large cannon carriage would have rolled.

and up here by the window, you can see an opening where the front of this carriage, a big tongue would stick into this groove and up here in the window, you can still see the hole where a big pin would drop in and that enormous carriage would allow the cannon to swing back and forth and cover quite a broad range. e opening where the cannon ball flew through, the windows remained shut at all times, big iron shutters with big springs on them and the force of the explosion of the cannonball would open the shutters and they immediately would slam shut. over here you'll see a flew. so as you can imagine, all that cannon fire, black powder, the amount of smoke it would generate, each one of these case mates has its own flew so the smoke would exhaust the area. up here you'll see some

brackets where we suspect the soldiers stood on the cannon carriage and hung their tools here. the soldiers also lived here in the case mate with their cannon. nte we are in one of the a chambers to the great magazine. one room away and you see these massive floor timbers that burned out decades ago. given the size of this room, it's not a very big room, maybe 10 by 16, i'd always wondered what could have been so heavy that they needed floor joists that massive and it came to me one day, gun powder, cannonballs. i think this is where they kept the cannonballs. if we walk this way, you'll be able to see where they kept the

gun powder. now, this is the great magazine. you can see it's a large room. it used to be two stories, the floor was removed at some point somehow, either burned out or was taken out. but this is a large room with the earliest use of concrete i've ever seen. you can see the old slats where the individual boards were made o poor a form and then giant granite blocks with shims stuck in the mortar to take up the space. this room does have some slots in the wall so that some air can circulate through here. you'll also see two small openings in the brickwork, one on the first floor and one on

the second floor. and those were from the little room on the other side called the candle room. and in that opening, they would place a lantern and that lantern was the only means of illumination for this area. for obvious reasons. the soldiers who wore cobbled boots with nail heads on the bottom would have to don some sort of a wool or silk sock over their boots to enter this room and work in here. the fort was designed to be garrisonned with 500 troops. it never was fully garrisonned and never fired a single shot. i suspect it was obsolete by the time it was completed because armaments were advancing so rapidly at the time. it sat for a long time and caretakers came along and lived in it and just watched over it and world war ii they built the

concrete pad we see down in the parade ground and that was used to store what they call torpedoes, we now call them mines, that were used in an elaborate system throughout casco bay because we know you-boats came along the bay in world war ii and the mines were manufactured two islands over on great diamond island and there is a wonderful building in place where you see the mines were manufactured and tested and there's a narrow gauge railway they would bring the mines to the water and bring them over here and store them. eventually the fort was put on the national register and i think it was 1971 the city of portland acquired the property and since then it's just remained sort of neglected and just recently the city has taken a renewed interest in the property and now we have the army corps of engineers here doing a hazardous mitigation

program making it a safer place, due probably to social media, this place is on everyone's radar, everyone is curious about it and everyone wants to be here and experience this space. friends of the fort are seeing, first of all this place does not fall apart and we know we can save the structure and then it becomes making it accessible to more people so we can have a sustainable model to do the work that needs to be done. and then it becomes about stewardship, making sure that this wonderful spot never falls into the hands of a condo development or a casino or something that would be clearly inappropriate for this space. well, there are lots of challenges. the immediate ones are access because this is an island. so everyone needs to come here by boat. luckily it's only one mile from land. so right now 2/3 of the 7,000

people that come here in the summertime are coming by kayak and some of them come from the islands, some of them come from the mainland and they do tours here all day every day and bring people here via kayak all summer long. kayaking is the easiest way to get here because you're not bound by the tides and don't have to worry about your boat and it's one mile, an easy paddle but encourage people who do that to hire a guide or have some sort of experience. you also can come out with a boat. we're hoping in the coming years to put a dock in and just make this more accessible to the general population. i've been coming here since i was a teen abler and it's just a mystical place, especially when you start coming here as a child. like i said before, we just don't build structures like this anymore. it's unique. it's the only place like this that i know of in maine that's this accessible one mile from

shore and you have this amazing structure that we'll just never see again. so we have to save it. it's also special to me because for a long time now, i've wanted to see some sort of performance happen here, shakespeare or something along those lines. it's importance to the people who live here and visit here for the reasons i mentioned before. everyone is affected by this space. how could you not be when you step through that sally port and into that parade ground and see those case mate archways and all the stonework, it's just phenomenal. and most times people's jaws just drop when they first see it. >> this language of attack, of harm, of damage that by

expressing an opinion that you have 't like, inflicted an injury -- i found that very striking and frankly rather frightening if the truth be told, and quite emblematic of the way that the left is now responding to any sort of dissent and especially one that trenches on identity, grievance, politics, which of course is everywhere and has infected everything. >> university of pennsylvania law school professor amy wax on the limits of free expression on college campuses in the united states. sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. >> back live now at gettysburg college in pennsylvania for more from the civil war institute's annual summer