Memories and Echoes: A Brit's Journey into the American Civil War

For over thirty years Mark Simmons has been travelling to the USA to largely explore the background and legacy of the Civil War. It is a strange and often amusing odyssey mostly across the Southern States, a journey of many thousands of miles. Looking for the 'Memories and Echoes' of the Civil War, the event which more than any other has shaped the nation and continues to do so.

Mark follows in the footsteps of fellow Brits, fellow travellers, Colonels Henry Fletcher and Arthur Fremantle who witnessed the war first hand. And writers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray who visited the country prior to and just after the war. There are many other characters, some historical, some fictional, and some contemporary, all with their story to tell, their point to put.

The landscape still has the power to haunt with the shattering events branded into its soil. And there are occasions when the echoes seem strong, not mere ghost stories, something stronger than that, the past physically affecting the senses as if the past keeps reinventing itself. The journey starts in Atlanta.