Civil War

It was sometime in the spring - she's not certain of the date - when Helen Steinbacher swung open a long-locked safe in her Chester County home. Widowed since 1966, Steinbacher had lost the key to the safe years before and "had no idea what was in it. " But her son Michael "had been bugging me for years" to find out what was inside, she recalled last week. And so she had called a locksmith. Inside she found a confusing hodgepodge of papers and artwork that had belonged to her husband, Charles, who for 30 years was art director at the George Moll advertising agency in Philadelphia.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the 111th Infantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard had been, along with many other units, on federal service for almost 11 months. It would be four years before the guardsmen would return home. During World War II, this Norristown-based regiment would add to an already-honorable tradition. According to retired Col. William J. Huber, historian of the 111th Infantry Regiment, the unit can trace its lineage to colonial Pennsylvania.

In June 1917, corn grew on the land that would soon sprout Camp Dix. Three months later, nearly 50,000 young men were there training and living in barracks built so quickly that they had no indoor plumbing. Large stoves were used for heat, and the electricity was carried by two lone wires running down the center of each building. "They were training in the clothes they arrived in," historian Daniel W. Zimmerman, curator of the Fort Dix Museum, told a crowd Tuesday at Barnes & Noble Bookseller at the East Gate Square shopping center.

The Gettysburg Cyclorama building is history. In a cloud of concrete dust, the 50-year-old battlefield landmark came tumbling down Saturday after a 14-year struggle over its fate. At once reviled by Civil War buffs and beloved by fans of modern architecture, the circular structure, designed by the world-famous architect Richard Neutra, was built to house the massive Cyclorama painting depicting the Battle of Gettysburg's most important moment. By design, it occupied a prime piece of real estate on the battlefield, marking the Union line on Cemetery Ridge where Northern troops repelled Confederate forces during the climactic clash known as Pickett's Charge on the battle's final day, July 3, 1863.

Johnny Reb battles on. At least he does in the South, where reenacting the Civil War is a growing hobby. Tony Horwitz depicts the reenactors - and others who seek to keep the memory of the war alive - humorously, sympathetically and critically in his new book, Confederates in the Attic (Pantheon, $27.50). Horwitz relates how in 1965 he became aware of his 101-year-old great-grandfather's fascination with the Civil War. He muses over why Poppa Isaac, who arrived in the United States from czarist Russia 17 years afer the war ended, made as one of his first purchases in America a book of Civil War sketches.

It is six score and four years since the end of the Civil War, and a strong case can be made that movies have never really done justice to the conflict that proved to be perhaps the most dominant and far-reaching in this country's history. There are, to be sure, such masterworks as D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and hardy perennials such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and Friendly Persuasion (1956). But the truth is that directors have not taken to the infinite complexities and many subtexts presented by the Civil War. They have left that, for the most part, to the novelists and the historians.

The detachment from the Stonewall Brigade found their approach north blocked. The Yanks from the 71st Pennsylvania Infantry had already established a stronghold at Somerton United Methodist Church in Northeast Philadelphia. Because of traffic on I-95, the rebels arrived too late for the wedding ceremony of their comrade-in-arms, Mallen Cunningham, to Beth Schneider. Instead, the Confederates got to blow bubbles at men in Union blue, at women in hoop skirts, and at the newlyweds as they left the church.

The plaintive, opening notes of the fiddle seemed to entwine themselves around the words of the soldier's last letter to his wife: . . . My very dear Sarah . . . . The moving melody and the reading of Maj. Sullivan Ballou's poignant letter were highlights of last week's Public Broadcasting Service documentary series The Civil War. Almost as soon as The Civil War opened last Sunday night, Florentine Films, which created the series, was deluged...

No one died this time. The rubber bullets produced no fatalities. No skulls were bashed by billy clubs. There were no horrors of torture during imprisonment. But Monday's skirmish was probably as significant as anything that has happened in South Africa since the Soweto massacre. It even may have been the day the war finally began. Scores of clergymen, wearing their robes and carrying Bibles, linked arms for a march from St. George's Cathedral to deliver a petition to the South African Parliament.

A Civil War Reunion, with battle reenactments, period music and children's activities, is scheduled for this weekend at Pennypacker Mills in Schwenksville. The annual event, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow and Sunday, also will include guest speakers, a fashion show and the sale of reproduced Civil War goods. Hundreds of reenactors are expected. Admission is free. Donations will be accepted. All parking for the event is at Central Perkiomen Valley Park on Plank Road, off Route 73 and Route 29. Free parking and shuttle bus service will be provided.

Ayman Suleiman did not come from a medical family. His father was a truck driver, his mother a housewife. But as a young man in Syria, he was influenced by a close friend's physician brother who told him, "You are a better person if you are helping sick people and your family and your neighborhood. " Suleiman took the words to heart and became an ophthalmologist. Little did he dream that decades later, he would be practicing in the United States, driven here by a fellow eye specialist, British-trained Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

From swords and muskets to skinning knives and dream catchers, Hamilton's Civil War and Native American Museum combines centuries-old war memorabilia and indigenous artifacts under one small roof, representing a wide range of history. "If these articles could talk, if you could see the person that used them and hunted with them and brought food back for their families, this room would be full of stories," said Clyde Quin, who manages the museum's Native American collection. The museum, which opened in 1996, is housed in the John Abbott House, a two-story, seven-room tenant house on Kuser Road in Veterans Park built in 1730.

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. - This year, Fredericksburg celebrates its 285th birthday. If this milestone isn't enough reason to soak up the city's well-preserved colonial charm and to stroll along 18th-century streets where brass plaques identify homes' original owners, consider this: You can follow George Washington's footsteps all over Fredericksburg. The future U.S. president grew up in Fredericksburg, but even after he moved to Mount Vernon, he often returned here. His mother Mary, brother Charles, and sister Betty lived here, as did future Continental Army Gen. Hugh Mercer, George's trusted friend, who was Mary's physician and druggist.

OKLAHOMA CITY - At least two tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma and another hit Arkansas yesterday as a powerful storm system moved through the middle of the country. At least one injury was reported when a home was hit in rural western Arkansas. The National Weather Service reported two tornadoes on the ground near Perkins and Ripley in north central Oklahoma and another west of Oden, Ark. Arkansas Emergency Management spokesman Tommy Jackson said first responders were having trouble reaching the destroyed home because a number of trees were blocking the road.

Like Mother Nature - where would we all be without DNA? - Gertrude Stein was fond of repetition. As she wrote in her novel The Making of Americans , "Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding. " Well, I wonder. Or I did until I watched a good portion of a nearly hour-long film called Fase at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The film, by Belgian Thierry De Mey, focuses on two female dancers as they execute a series of synchronized spins and movements that suggest vigorous calisthenics.

BEIRUT - The leader of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah said Saturday that Syria cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of enemies as he defiantly justified sending his fighters to support President Bashar al-Assad's government. In a televised address, Hassan Nasrallah gave the clearest public acknowledgment to date that his men were fighting alongside Assad's troops and would continue to do so. As Nasrallah spoke, Hezbollah and government forces were escalating an assault on the strategically important Syrian town of Qusair.

IT IS AN inconvenient truth that Monday is Memorial Day, a day of picnics, trips to the zoo, the Shore, the mountains - and mattress sales. OK, other kinds of sales, too, not just mattresses. In America, Memorial Day unspools like Mercantile Day. Only a small percentage of Americans attend parades. Even fewer make trips to the cemetery to decorate the graves of those who gave their lives to protect this great and imperfect nation. After the Civil War, Decoration Day was created as a day to lay flowers on the graves of soldiers, Americans all, who died wearing either the Blue or the Gray.

For nearly a century, the Silent Sentinel watched over the graves of Civil War veterans at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Yeadon and Southwest Philadelphia. The bronze figure of a Union soldier clasping the end of a musket stood at rest amid long, neat rows of white marble headstones. Then, as though deserting its post in fall 1970, the statue disappeared. Thieves pulled it from its granite base and tried to sell it to a Camden scrap dealer, who alerted police. Silent Sentinel was recovered, repaired at a Chester foundry, and stored out of public view for more than 40 years, until a secure location could be found and money raised for a granite base.

BEIRUT - Hezbollah was pulled more deeply into Syria's civil war as 28 guerrillas from the Lebanese Shiite militant group were killed and dozens wounded while fighting rebels, Syria activists said Monday. The intense battle drove rebels from large parts of the town of Qusair, part of a withering government offensive aimed at securing a strategic land corridor from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast. Hezbollah-affiliated hospitals in Lebanon urged blood donations through mosque loudspeakers and ambulances raced along the Damascus road in a stark indication of the group's increasingly prominent role in Syria.

BAGHDAD - Iraq's wave of bloodshed sharply escalated Monday with more than a dozen car bombings across the country, part of attacks that killed at least 95 people and brought echoes of past sectarian carnage and fears of a dangerous spillover from Syria's civil war next door. The latest spiral of violence - which has claimed more than 240 lives in the last week - carries the hallmarks of the two sides that brought nearly nonstop chaos to Iraq for years: Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaeda's branch in Iraq, and Shiite militias defending their newfound power after Saddam Hussein's fall.