Because of its enormous significance to American history, the author wants her students to gain a rich understanding of the Battle at Gettysburg. She also would like them to make a strong emotional connection to it. She wants her students to engage with the Battle of Gettysburg on many levels--to become tangled up with the past. Her goal is to guide them toward an in-depth understanding of this event--the larger historical context in which it occurred, the ideology that drove many Confederate soldiers into this battle (an ideology grounded in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Revolutionary War), the events that caused both Union and Confederate soldiers to converge at Gettysburg, the dramatic stories of people who participated in the war or waited anxiously at home, and how this battle shaped events following the Civil War. In this article, the author describes a history work which encourages her students to make emotional connections to the characters and events at Gettysburg, engaging their imaginative and literary powers to enter the world of their history studies. She discusses the so called "third space," a space which combines traditional history studies with a student's (informed) imagination, an imagination that is developed and nurtured by the studies of literature. (Contains 11 notes.)