Antietam is the name English-speaking history books give to a terrible one-day battle in the American Civil War, fought on 17 September 1862 beside a small river in Maryland called Antietam Creek. The South also called it the Battle of Sharpsburg, after the nearby town. General Robert E. Lee had taken the Confederate army north, hoping to threaten Washington and win the war on Union ground. Union soldiers under General George McClellan met him there and stopped that march. Though actually it was not a clean, movie-style victory. Both sides were torn to pieces; it is still counted as the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than twenty thousand men killed, wounded, or missing. Lee's army was not destroyed, but it could not go on, and it fell back into Virginia. Because Lee had been held, President Lincoln used the moment to announce the Emancipation Proclamation, which said enslaved people in the rebel states would be free. So the name in a history book is a creek, a battlefield, and a turning point at once.

安提塔姆戰役（美國內戰；南軍亦稱夏普斯堡戰役）