Battle Of Gettysburg

The state of TIAH

July 3rd, 2006

Alternate Historian's Note: Everything seems to be working – the problem with the History Channel seemed to lie on their end, and not at the Academy. Here's today's delayed post.

in 1863, a movement of Union troops to the wrong side of the battle gave Confederate General Robert E. Lee just the opportunity he had been looking for, and he broke the US line at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Although they were outnumbered, the CSA forces charging from the flanks swept the Union soldiers from the field and soon had General Meade on the retreat. Lee then gathered his troops together and assaulted the Pennsylvanian capitol at Harrisburg, taking the city in a few days. General Meade counciled against any rash attempts to push Johnny Reb out of the north, which led President Lincoln to dismiss him and appoint Ulysses Grant the commander of all Union soldiers, as well as call up a wider draft of men. With Confederate troops so close to their own borders, northern men volunteered in huge numbers. Although they were inexperienced, Grant was able to use the superior size of his forces to surround Lee in Pennsylvania. At the battle of the Susquehanna in September, Grant forced Lee's surrender and imprisoned the south's leading strategist. Without Lee, the Confederacy's resistance to northern advances crumbled, and the war was all but over by January of 1864. The northern response after Gettysburg is often considered the turning point of the war.

in 1947, rancher Mac Brazel a couple of charred and torn bodies on his ranch. Just two days before, something had strewn wreckage across his property, and he hadn't thought much of it, simply telling his boys to clear the trash away. The bodies scare him, and he decides not to say anything about it until after the 4th of July weekend is over. With the help of his sons, he buries the bodies and hides the strange pieces of wreckage he found around them.

in 2017, after the somewhat confusing presentation about the Dyson sphere they are sitting on, the crew from the Pokor and the Eagle finally meet their hosts; four small creatures scurry into the meeting room and rest themselves on the furniture around the table. They are like large centipedes, with a beige fur covering their entire bodies and a single large red eye. The Quarai translator captures their high-pitched whistling, clicking language and tries a couple of words back to them. They seem perplexed, and a small machine rolls out of the wall and begins whistling and clicking at them. The machine then turns to the crew of humans and Quarai and speaks in Quarai. Captain Mawrao excitedly says, “Translation machine of their own. It say welcome to Pr't'(whistle). Name of the sphere, I think. Hard to say. Our translator working with it. Rest of us, we get to just sit around.” The Quarai, unwilling to be less than friendly, engage the Pr't'(whistle)ians in a sort of mime dialogue while the three species learn to talk to each other.

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