How does one get one's mind around a battle - especially one that went on for three days and involved 150,000 individuals, as Gettysburg did? Long lists of regiments and brigades, hour-by-hour timelines, and maps with blue and red blocks and arrows all over are of little value to people who don't already know a lot about Gettysburg. But individual episodes, with well-defined stakes and memorable characters, stick in the mind. People might forget a map showing the position of the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, but they never forget Jeff Daniels (playing Union Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in the film Gettysburg) shouting "Bayonets!" as he readies his unit to charge. The danger is that we can come to mistake the stories for the history. The real history of Gettysburg is far more complex than any one narrative.