Time Travel Thoughts

Just a quick thought that kind of harkens back to my very first post a few months back where I speak a bit on time travel.
I have had many discussions on the possibilities of a human traveling back in time. I personally don't believe that could ever happen, at least not in the way that we know it. By that I mean, for a person of the 21st century to literally travel back, say, to the colonial times where he could partake in associating with the folks of the era would/could never happen. As the well-worn scenario goes: if one meets up with one's own grandfather as a child and murders said grandfather as a child, how can he be born to go back in time to murder his grandfather?
But, can a "time-traveler," instead of physically going back in time and perhaps changing an event, go back and witness an event 'as it happened?' In other words, if I were to travel back to the time of, say, the Civil War, maybe I would be able to watch the Battle of Shilo as it actually occurred but yet not be able to take part in it, for fear of changing history.
Or am I going off the deep end here?