"World War I, whose guns opened fire just over a century ago, is often called the first modern large-scale war, when traditional fighting tactics gave way to the murderous innovations of industrial weaponry, including poison gas, tanks, long-range artillery, and armed aircraft. But Harvard President Drew Faust on Monday offered a different narrative.
Instead, she said, it was a conflict a half century earlier and an ocean away, the American Civil War, that first pitted the infantry charge and other traditional tactics against rapidly modernizing weaponry. It was the Civil War, whose increasingly sophisticated gunfire and artillery sent men desperately digging into the earth for shelter, that pioneered trench warfare, she said. It was the Civil War, and General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea, that expanded the fight beyond battlefields to civilians supporting the war. It was the Civil War — still the bloodiest in U.S. history — whose 750,000 dead showed the world the carnage that modern weapons could produce, and prompted governments to honor and bury the fallen in national cemeteries.
In England, Faust delivered the prestigious Sir Robert Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge's historic Senate House. The hourlong speech drew a crowd of roughly 150 people — including more than a dozen Harvard alumni studying or teaching at Cambridge — to the neoclassical stone building completed in 1730 as a formal ceremonial venue…"
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