Frederick, Maryland–where we went over the weekend for a very Rose Metal Press wedding– is so full of Civil War history that it’s almost impossible to walk down its quaint streets without tripping over, for example, the Barbara Fritchie House……home of the subject of the John Greenleaf Whittier poem “Barbara Frietchie,” which tells the rhyming tale of a brave little old lady who shook the Union flag in Stonewall Jackson’s slavery-upholding, nation-tearing-aparting face when he was marching through the town, telling him “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / but spare your country’s flag,” causing the Confederate general’s countenance to experience, “A shade of sadness, a blush of shame.” Winston Churchill loved this poem so much, he recited it from memory when FDR toured him around America in 1943. And who can blame him? The idea of a 95-year-old, non-violent, female Union Civil War hero is compelling. No matter that the story of Fritchie is most probably bullshit (or, as the plaque below has it, that it’s disputed by “spoilsport historians”); the whole thing is available for tourists to read, right outside the house:Frederick also boasts The National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which in turn boasts creepily excellent wax figures… and important information about Walt Whitman’s service as a nurse–a “male nurse,” as the exhibit explains–during the war: More haunting than any of that, though, was Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia……site of the abolitionist John Brown‘s last stand……commemorated with museums, structures, and artworks all over the town, including the one pictured above which features a quote from Stephen Vincent Benet’s forgotten (or pretty forgotten) and mediocre Pulitzer Prize-winning book-length poem John Brown’s Body. We happened to be visiting the day after the U.S. government announced that they’d killed Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone attack in Yemen, so it was an interesting time to be thinking of terrorism, both of the domestic variety and the kind that comes from abroad. But that’s way too much to get into for a blog post, so I’ll just recommend that you visit Harper’s Ferry if you ever get the opportunity, and close with this photo from the wedding–congrats, Abby: