During 2000, spearheaded by Senator Robert C. Byrd, the U.S. Congress passed Resolution 129 (non-binding) about our students' history education. The resolution calls for "history teachers and educators at all levels redouble their efforts to bolster the knowledge of the United States history among students of all ages and to restore the vitality of America's civic memory." Unfortunately, shortly after Senator Byrd’s passing in 2010, this program was eliminated from the Annual Budget, though it lives on through the Byrd Center’s annual Teachers Institute program. You can read more about this here.

The study determined that 81% of our elite college seniors could not answer basic high school level questions about our nation's history. The question that asked students the source of the phrase, “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” had only twenty-two percent (22%) of the students answering correctly that it was from the Gettysburg Address. On another question, approximately one-third of elite college seniors (34%) correctly identified George Washington as the American general at Yorktown; 37 percent thought that Ulysses S. Grant was the general at that battle.

The 9th Battery Massachusetts Volunteers are a group of individuals who share a common passion - the history of the United States during the Civil War. We decided that we could pass on that knowledge to students in a nontraditional manner. How many teachers have the ability to dress and act the part of a soldier with the appropriate equipment? We have set a reasonable cost that can be approved by most school systems for this program of bringing the Civil War to life for our students. All we're asking is to recover our costs.