Cyclorama to be unveiled again amid diverging views of past
ATLANTA (AP) - At a time when counties, cities and states across the South are removing or covering up Confederate monuments, one of the world's largest paintings of the American Civil War will reopen to the public Friday.
But the artwork was never intended to celebrate the Confederacy, historians say.
Atlanta's Cyclorama depicts charging horses, wounded soldiers, cannon blasts and smoke on a Civil War battlefield in Atlanta as Union troops defeated Confederate forces and then torched much of the city.
The painting also takes viewers into another, more personal battlefield in the mind's eye, this one involving memory, facts, fiction, propaganda and romanticized portrayals of history, historians say.