Civil War general blindsided at pivotal Gettysburg battle

By Eric M. Johnson

(Reuters) - Confederate General Robert E. Lee was "virtually blind" to the superior positions held by Union troops hidden by rolling hills and valleys, which contributed to his downfall at the pivotal battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War, researchers said on Friday.

Lee's ill-fated combat decisions and ultimate defeat likely stemmed from bad reconnaissance reports, his forces spread too thinly across 7 miles, and an inability to see the more compact and elevated Union forces, according to geographers and cartographers who synthesized old maps, text and data into a digital model of the three-day Pennsylvania battle in 1863.

"We know that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was virtually blind at Gettysburg," Anne Kelly Knowles, a geography professor at Middlebury College, wrote in the article accompanying the interactive map on smithsonianmag.com.

"Altogether, our mapping reveals that Lee never had a clear view of enemy forces ... In addition, Lee did not grasp - or acknowledge - just how advantageous the Union's position was," Knowles wrote.

This week marks the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg, which took place over July 1-3 and claimed roughly 50,000 soldiers from the North and South.

It is regarded a crucial turning point in the bloodiest war in U.S. history that preserved the United States as a single country and led to the abolition of slavery. Roughly 620,000 Americans died.

On July 2, 1863, the second day of battle, Lee decided to launch an attack against a vulnerable patch of Yankee resistance around a pair of hills to the South - called the Round Tops.

But he failed to see thousands of Union troops that had gathered during the night and lurked in the vicinity. Union General Governor K. Warren spotted the advance and summoned reinforcements.

"Realizing the limits of what Lee could see makes his decisions appear even bolder, and more likely to fail, than we knew," she wrote.

The Confederate defeat at Vicksburg, Mississippi, came a day after Gettysburg. Lee ultimately surrendered in Virginia in 1865.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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Emmys: Monica Potter's 'Parenthood' cancer battle began with her own real-life scare

By Jethro Nededog

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Monica Potter's journey through the experiences of a mom with cancer on NBC's "Parenthood" actually began with her own medical scare. "When I went in last year for a mammogram, my first one, they said they found something," Potter told TheWrap.

On the heels of the discovery, the 41-year-old mother of three went home and emailed executive producer Jason Katims, pitching a cancer storyline in the show's fourth season for her character Christina. "He emailed me back and said, ‘I have the chills, because we just broke that in the writers room,'" she remembered. "We were able to go on the journey together." (For his part, Katims also had a personal connection to the subject - his wife is a breast cancer survivor who is more than two years cancer-free.)

Luckily, Potter's scare ended up with the diagnosis of a benign cyst and a clean bill of health. But instead of delving into research on the subject of cancer, Potter said she went into the season with very little preparation for a storyline that took her character through diagnosis, chemotherapy and then remission. "I didn't want to know anything about what goes on with breast cancer and the treatments for it, because I wanted to experience it with the character along the way."

That's actually very strange for the Cleveland-born actress, who considers herself very "Type A" when it comes to preparation and who has gotten ribbing from colleagues for her methods. "I'll take a script, I'll rip it apart, I'll highlight, I'll staple each scene.

Sometimes, we shoot two at the same time, so I'll put them in categories," she said. "This year, I decided that I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't going to sit there and pull the scripts apart, and I wasn't going to have to know everything."

Not only did viewers react favorably to Christina's battle with cancer, but critics did, too. Potter recently won a Critics Choice Television Award for the portrayal and is getting a lot of Emmy buzz as well.

"I'm so excited and I'm so thrilled," she said. "And it's cool, because my boys are older, and they've seen me work at this since I was in my early 20s." Her career began, she said, when Danny, who was born in 1990 and is the oldest of her three children, was about 3.

"We'd travel all over and live in hotels, and I'd work and try to get paid. And the Critics Choice was the first award I'd ever been nominated for. To me, that's the best part of it all, to see the kids and their excitement. It shows hard work and dedication and loving what you do can be celebrated. And it's kind of awesome."

View the original article here

Emmys: Monica Potter's 'Parenthood' cancer battle began with her own real-life scare

By Jethro Nededog

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Monica Potter's journey through the experiences of a mom with cancer on NBC's "Parenthood" actually began with her own medical scare. "When I went in last year for a mammogram, my first one, they said they found something," Potter told TheWrap.

On the heels of the discovery, the 41-year-old mother of three went home and emailed executive producer Jason Katims, pitching a cancer storyline in the show's fourth season for her character Christina. "He emailed me back and said, ‘I have the chills, because we just broke that in the writers room,'" she remembered. "We were able to go on the journey together." (For his part, Katims also had a personal connection to the subject - his wife is a breast cancer survivor who is more than two years cancer-free.)

Luckily, Potter's scare ended up with the diagnosis of a benign cyst and a clean bill of health. But instead of delving into research on the subject of cancer, Potter said she went into the season with very little preparation for a storyline that took her character through diagnosis, chemotherapy and then remission. "I didn't want to know anything about what goes on with breast cancer and the treatments for it, because I wanted to experience it with the character along the way."

That's actually very strange for the Cleveland-born actress, who considers herself very "Type A" when it comes to preparation and who has gotten ribbing from colleagues for her methods. "I'll take a script, I'll rip it apart, I'll highlight, I'll staple each scene.

Sometimes, we shoot two at the same time, so I'll put them in categories," she said. "This year, I decided that I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't going to sit there and pull the scripts apart, and I wasn't going to have to know everything."

Not only did viewers react favorably to Christina's battle with cancer, but critics did, too. Potter recently won a Critics Choice Television Award for the portrayal and is getting a lot of Emmy buzz as well.

"I'm so excited and I'm so thrilled," she said. "And it's cool, because my boys are older, and they've seen me work at this since I was in my early 20s." Her career began, she said, when Danny, who was born in 1990 and is the oldest of her three children, was about 3.

"We'd travel all over and live in hotels, and I'd work and try to get paid. And the Critics Choice was the first award I'd ever been nominated for. To me, that's the best part of it all, to see the kids and their excitement. It shows hard work and dedication and loving what you do can be celebrated. And it's kind of awesome."

View the original article here