Shiloh, located in southwestern Tennessee, was the location of a major battle during the Civil War. Faulkner's fiction calls it both 'Shiloh,' as the battle was called in the North, and 'Pittsburg Landing,' as it was known in the South. The fighting took place on April 6-7th, 1862; by the end of what Absalom, Absalom! calls "the second day and the lost battle" (275), casualties on both sides totaled 23,746.
Like Atlanta in Georgia, Chattanooga in Tennessee was one of the major rail centers in the Confederacy, and a prized target for the Union Army. There were a number of battles around and for it during 1862 and 1863. Union forces occupied the city in September, 1863, which is the background to the way Drusilla mentions the city in The Unvanquished (96).
Requiem for a Nun refers to two locations in France that were prominent parts of the history of the Second World War. "Dunquerque" (more commonly anglicized as Dunkirk) was the coastal city in northern France from which England had to evacuate its army after German forces overran the country in May 1940, near the start of the War (193). "Utah Beach" was the code name that the Allies gave to the westernmost of the five Normandy beaches where the D-Day invasion of occupied France began on 6 June 1944 (193).
Looking to hop on a train to escape from Lena and his newborn child near the end of Light in August, Lucas Burch heads for a particular spot: "the crest of a grade where the northbound freights slow to a terrific and crawling gait" (433). It is also at this location that Bryon Bunch tries in vain to stop Burch from fleeing his responsibility.
In The Mansion Mink Snopes finishes his stealthy entry into Jefferson down the railroad tracks at this point, described as a "quiet edge-of-town back street beneath the rigid arms of the semaphore arms of the crossing warning and a single lonely street light" (448). Since the first person he sees is a Negro boy, this may be the black district in town.
Two of the major battles of the Civil War were fought near Chancellorsville in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The first, the Battle of Chancellorsville, took place between April 30 to May 6, 1863. According to Cass Edmonds' account of the fighting in Go Down, Moses, Union commander Joseph Hooker sits on the front gallery of a house in Chancellorsville "drinking rum toddies and telegraphing Lincoln that he had defeated Lee" (272).
The original name of Atlanta was 'Terminus,' because it was the end of the railway that was built in the 1830s to link coastal Georgia to the U.S. interior. By the time of the Civil War it was called Atlanta, and was one of the South's great railroad centers.
