Your county as Barbados

Franklin County, PA, is (to me) an utterly ordinary county except that some Civil War trails pass through it. If you could re-imagine the burning of Chambersburg on a visit there, you would have maxed out the county's ACW jollies potential.

Imagine my surprise to learn that

Tourism employment represents an estimated 15 percent of the jobs in the county economy, according to a 2003 study ... More than $325 million in revenue was generated in Franklin and Perry counties from transportation, food, lodging, shopping and entertainment.

An economy with 15% of its prople in tourism trades and they want to increase that? Any Caribbean island steers its econmomy in the opposite direction.

Honor the source

How hard can it be to honor the source?

Brian Downey explores his own reaction to seeing a drawing of McClellan riding the line at Antietam - drawn from life. A lesser man would dismiss the artifact in light of his own research. Brian is buckling down to do more research - did the ride happen and when?

The norm in Civil War history is to discount or rationalize away documentary evidence or testimony that breaks up the master narrative, archetypes, or general interpretations of various sorts. We preserve our literary crockery, folks. Another gambit is to work new discoveries into the master narrative; find a way to make stuff fit.

Maybe this is human nature. I notice this story today about a black panther chasing an expert observer - a forester - across the South Carolina border. He ran for his life to gain this prize analysis of his experience: "Black panthers are not native to the southeastern United States, meaning Fletcher might have seen a river otter or a bobcat, state wildlife officials in Georgia and South Carolina said." Maybe it was a vole chasing him!

Meanwhile, Harry Smeltzer is wrestling with a book in which the editor hastens to contradict his source whenever that source praises McClellan or causes some other offense against public decency. (Zero tolerance for violations of Centennial dogma! Demand no less, dear reader.)

This is a bit more extreme than what I see almost everywhere at all times. Generally, someone presents the study of a regiment or person but feels uneasy letting that story tell itself on its own terms. Thinking context is needed, these authors resort to shopworn memes, obsolete narrative superstructures, and odious archtypes to better "inform" their readers of the "larger picture."

But history, like today's Dow Jones Industrial Average, is the composite of many individual events; the primary sources are infinitely more powerful than dime-story rehashes offered from 50,000 feet. In Civil War history can we please begin to learn how to honor the source?

A new diagnosis for Lincoln

It's a mouthful: spinocerebellar ataxia type 5.

ACW Publishing

Being slow to follow up on on the post "ACW Publishing 2006" has clearly caused confusion among those not familiar with this annual series. Said post ticks off a list of topics, corresponding to bullet points ... those posts are forthcoming individually along with numbers. We start with the general, move to the particular. Obscurity will yield to understanding.

The underlying language and concepts used in that post have been described previously here, ad nauseum, and so I get a little careless in linking to them. That's been fixed below. The most important thing you will ever learn in this matter bears repeating in red, bold letters, however. Sales figures are closely guarded secrets. You will never find them on a web site that I can link to.

For continuity, you'll want to read previous installments.

And yes, I do allow my biases to influence my interpretation of sales. Nevertheless, you won't find a better analysis of Civil War publishing if only because none other is available. Anywhere. Hat tip to Kevin Levin and on to the links.

BOOK SALES 2004

Publishing - an overview (lots of definitions and explanations). Includes Ingram formulas with examples.

Book sales and new thinking - context. Gives nonfiction/history blockbusters sales examples as a context for measuring commercial success in ACW sales.

Book sales and new thinking - more context. Gives high sales ACW titles for additional context - Foote and Shaara, fiction and nonfiction.

Ingram and the fudge factor. On tweaking the sales estimation formula.

Book sales and new thinking: the matrix. Some notes on T. Harry Williams and his sales today.

Book sales and new thinking: the colossus. Nevins in the historiography of the Centennial and his sales today. Kenneth Williams and Catton are mentioned too.

Book sales and new thinking: a stillness in Catton county. Catton's in-print corpus is reviewed from a publishing business perspective.

Book sales and new thinking: the fading Cry. Describes McPherson's entry into publishing, his significance historiographically, and non-Cry sales results.

Book sales and new thinking: vestigial Cry. Compares sales results for picture Cry, HB Cry, and softcover Cry.

Book sales and new thinking: Sears. Examines Sears' mixed sales success and its meaning.

USA Today's top selling books of 2004. No ACW titles ranked.

Book sales and new thinking: Davis and Gallagher. A brief look at what these two stalwarts of "old thinking" represent today in terms of publishing success.

Book sales and new thinking: in summary. How success and failure will influence historiography.

BOOK SALES 2005

Prelude - This points to the previous series linked above.

Prelude 2 - Brief mid-year impressions.

Book sales 2005: The Winik Factor. Sets the stage for the 2005 survey by exploring the powerful sales of an unknown first-time ACW author.

Book sales 2005: Sears falters. Sears had a rough year and the details are reviewed in a few representative titles.

Book sales 2005: novel action. A look at the Gingrich/Forstchen phenomenon compared to the Shaaras' record.

Calculating sales figures. Author Ann Larabee pointed out an inherent weakness in Ingram-based sales estimating.

Book sales 2005 - Grant books. There was a wave of Grant publishing. This post looked in at how Grant sales were doing.

Thus ended the mid-year survey. The complete year was analyzed in the next series of posts in '06.

Book sales 2005 - great expectations. Considers a list of titles from which great sales had been expected.

Book sales 2005 - the Grant bubble. Looks at trade house results for the raft of new Grant titles.

Book sales 2005 - Battle Cry of Freedom. Ponders the riddle of Battle Cry sales while considering the failure of McPhersons other books.

Team of Rivals has morphed...

... into "Lincoln," a film starring Liam Neeson and Marcia Gay Harden as Mary Lincoln.

Harden (photo, right) is not yet confirmed - maybe because she doesn't look the part. It will be hard enough to take Neeson scene after scene; together Harden and Neeson could drive watchability way down. I get the feeling this is a made-for-TV movie to air on the Lifetime channel.

For a good laugh have a look at the film's message board. The first question in the first section asks if Tom Hanks will play in this. In the last forum, about future films, fans speculate on what a great job director Spielberg could do with a movie version of Smurfs. Oh Hollywood, you kill me.

Meanwhile Neeson says he has read 22 Lincoln books so far and is still reading.

Savas Beatie and sales

I mentioned Savas Beatie in a recent post and said that its prospects seemed good based on the titles whose sales I follow through the wholesaler Ingram.

Founder Theodore Savas was, as it happens, interviewed by a blogger earlier this month and said then that he tries to do the bulk of his selling outside of bookstore channels. That would be outside of my Ingram metric, my way of measuring success. Put another way, I inadvertently looked at the least part of his sales and pronounced them stronger than the main part of some trade titles' sales.

I'm not sure he is giving the whole recipe for his secret sauce in this interview, but the points that struck me were:

* Identify the lack first and then hunt up or commission the best ms
* Work only with hard-working authors
* Maintain a collaborative culture
* Insist on an author's website with fresh content
* Craft better books - in terms of total package - than competitors
* Leverage small networks
* Treat the bookstore as your venue of last resort
* Leave "remainders" out of your plans.

An aside: I have noticed that since Savas Beatie picked up the Army of the Potomac series, Da Capo, publisher of the first two titles in the series, has kept the series in stock in the major chains. When they first came out, it was hit or miss to find either volume. But in the last six months I have never been in a store where both are not on the shelf together. It takes attention, nagging, and muscle to keep books shelved in retail outlets and Da Capo seems to be working for a payoff riding sales strength to be provided by Savas Beatie when the third volume comes out next month.

Look at the interview. This Q&A was a multipart posting: part 1, part2, part3, part4.

Idea for a monument

Dr. Seuss envisioned this in WWII. Let's build it now to honor nonfiction readers everywhere.

Speaking of publishing

I laughed myself silly at this post. Best bit: telling a prospective agent, "the book is a really rough edit so far. when i land the money deal i can move forward to make it complete."

These jokers remind me of a kind of author I tend to run into more and more - the non-reader author. "I was never much of a reader..." Hey, it shows don't you know?

Do non-drivers design automobiles?

ACW publishing in 2006: first impressions

These conclusions may be tested or examined in later posts, but in going through the numbers supplied by the wholesaler Ingram here is what I found. The context overall is reduced demand for ACW titles.

Observation: The sales debut of "new thinking" titles is soft, after which a fairly normal sales decay rate sets in - prohibiting these titles from achieving a viable mid-list status.
Comment: These titles may need to debut in economical softcover editions and then switch over to electronic or other formats to persist in midlist. Publishers, please know when you are handling new thinking and add some "viral marketing" approaches.

Observation: New Lincoln books were a washout. I refer to trade titles which failed on the trade scale of operations. This includes Goodwin's Rivals, Wills' Gettysburg reflections, and even John Brown, Abolitionist.
Comment: Team of Rivals sold especially poorly. Shipped and displayed everywhere, my numbers tell me it was returned to the publisher in large lots. I don't know whether to read cause and effect into this. Was DKG the victim of her own reputation, or a reduced level of interest in Abe, or did people not care for the book? Her weak leadership mirrored larger weaknesses in the genre, including an abnormal sales collapse in Tripp's gay Lincoln effort. (Some of my control data for historical nonfictions, e.g. the late S. Ambrose's sales, followed the same path.)

Observation: Gingrich and Forstchen's alternative Civil War novels have crashed into a sales cellar out of which they seem unlikely to climb back into midlist status.
Comment: They debuted with huge numbers under a science fiction marque and then went into an steep, accelerated sales decay pattern year-on-year. This is nothing like the situation with the Shaaras, whose sales are decaying in slow motion. If this pattern represents sci-fi niche normalcy, then we were dealing all along with sci-fi readers, not ACW nor even nonfiction readers.

Observation: McPherson's (non-illustrated) Battle Cry continues steady state with altogether insignificant sales variation year on year.
Comment: The year-on-year variations I see in other rock-solid mid- and backlist titles far exceed the variations in Battle Cry sales data. You'll give me a "DUH" for saying this, but I now feel comfortable suggesting that Battle Cry figures are overwhelmingly textbook sales-driven via assigned reading. The lack of significant variation says "no" to the possibility of a textbook-based core number plus commercial sales and "yes" to entirely textbook sales-based.

Observation: The springtime of U.S. Grant publishing has passed directly into winter.
Comment: It may be a long time before another Grant book comes out in a major publisher's catalog.

Observation: The prolific W. C. Davis and G. Gallagher are suffering normal sales decay rates on modest debuts across a wide number of titles.
Comment: Neither "old thinking" author is going to see viable midlist status for any of his work despite high name recognition. You can view these two as the victims of an AWOL readership or blame them as the cause for same.

Observation: Savas Beatie (in the case of the few titles of theirs I track) is doing better than many major houses and surely better than most academic presses .
Comment: This is a backhanded complement given the state of ACW sales. Sitting a thousand miles away from their accounting department, though, it looks like Civil War publishing, in the right hands, could be a viable enterprise.

Civil War joke

Civil War jokes seem to be few and far between but I found one with which to test the Google joke meter. Here it is:

A soldier had lost his bayonet and whittled one from wood so he could stand inspection. He was hoping not to be discovered until the regiment had gone into battle where he could pick up one from a dead soldier. At an inspection, an officer asked to see his bayonet. The soldier stated " Sir, I promised my father I would never unsheathe my bayonet unless I intended to kill with it." The Officer insisted he hand over the bayonet. Taking it out, the Soldier looked skyward and declared " May the Lord change this bayonet to wood for breaking my vow."

Result:

Google laughs!!!

The joke's funniness percentage is: 50.7732%

The joke's popularity is: 2.589
(where 7=super popular, 1=not popular)

Shepherdstown = safe?

Civil War Preservation Trust seems to have saved some battlefield acreage at Shepherdstown but details are scarce. This is the only relevant press release I could find on their site and this is the only news story.

Meanwhile, the Missionary Ridge viewshed issues surrounding a proposed cell phone tower are going to get a public airing.

A fight over bronze Napoleons

Should they be in front of a veterans' hall or a medical facility? This Maine fight seems a waste of time and money. (More here.)

Civil War flash cards

I was looking at the counterinsurgency bullet points in this posting by John Robb and mapping Civil War equivalents to each one, treating the Rebels as insurgents. Done sort of like flash cards - quick as you can - it's fun.

If you want to try it, click on the link above before reading any further, otherwise I may contaminate some of your own ideas.

Here's what I came up with on the QT:

"Attack critical nodes" - I thought of G-inC McClellan's Nov. 1861 strategy to advance on Southern rail lines both East and West, seizing, garrisoning, and holding rail junctions while moving downline to the next set. Kind of an internal Anaconda plan rarely analyzed in ACW histories and a foretaste of what was to come.

"Attack the insurgency's weakness in political cohesion by forcing it to respond to issues that are beyond its scope" - This correlates to emancipation or the gambit of making the war about slavery rather than independence.

"Reduce ... sources of funding" - Here I thought of the strategy of protracted war flattening the Southern economy and ruining the currency.

"Attack the ... technology infrastructure of the network" - Sherman's destruction of all war making property in Atlanta and beyond occurred to me; the blockade was intended to keep technology and war materiel out of the South, as well.

Even if you read these spoilers, have a go at it yourself.

And the point? One has to wonder if these four recommendations for fighting modern guerillas are drawn too broadly if they cover the case of the ACW.

Civil War magazines

I have always been against them; it's a stubborn prejudice. Today, I found a few phrases written by blogger Gagdad Bob that explain my thinking to a tee:

A magazine such as Psychology Today represents stupidity squared, because it mostly boils down the nonsense of academia for a semi-literate audience ...

Obviously, I like a lot of "nonsense of academia." The situation in Civil War publishing is a little different on other counts as well. My case might read as:

A magazine such as [Civil War whatever] represents stupidity squared, because it mostly boils down the nonsense of [pop history] to an even grosser level of simplification ...

Perhaps I am letting my feelings run wild. We all know some mags, like North and South, try to fill a gap in scholarly publishing. Nevertheless, I can't pick up one of these magazines without the irritation immediately outweighing any potential pleasure. So I no longer ever pick them up.

Apologies to our readers who enjoy these periodicals. If you get a moment, tell us why and how. I promise not to quibble.

Resonance on the Nile (3/3)

Much of Garnet Wolseley's Civil War commentary appeared after his Khartoum campaign to relieve Charles "Chinese" Gordon. He wrote favorably of Lee, and like so many Lee (or Lincoln) adherents, fell into spurious McClellan criticism. After an 1863 piece in Blackwoods, this McClellan criticism became muted; he seemed impressed with the McClellan appearing in Battles and Leaders volumes in the 1880s. Perhaps personal experience and reflection also played a part.

Unlike other McClellan critics, the Wolseley of 1863 would occupy a series of positions to act on his analysis for the next 30 years. Some of Wolseley's combats sported that Jacksonian dash he admired - notice his campaign against Ahmed Arabi, leader of an Egyptian army revolting against its hated foreign officers (such as William Wing Loring). Other actions, less so.

Another point of interest in Wolseley's early McClellan criticism involves paradoxes. We see the strongest admirers of Lee or Jackson most often practicing the most conservative war possible - witness he modern U.S. Army, for example. Was Wolseley himself an example of this? On the other hand, the strongest admirers of McClellan's art were Lee and his generals, something we know because of Wolseley's care in recording their views while in their company. His knowledge of this appreciation fails to save him from the shallow schoolyard dichotomy of "Lee this" and "McClellan that."

I thought I would juxtapose some of Wolseley's ACW comments with comments made about his own conduct of the Khartoum relief (speaking of "compare and contrast").

Wolseley: "The federal generals hitherto have been either extremely rash, or extremely cautious and slow." (45)

Winston Churchill: "He [Wolseley] saw himself confronted with a task which was easy and safe if it were undertaken at leisure, and which was doubtful and perilous if begun in haste. All the fruits of a long and successful career were staked on the result, and it is scarcely wonderful that he declined to be swift and reckless." (Churchill, The River War)

Wolseley: "The much-admired M’Clellan is slowness and caution incarnate; vigour and promptness of action are undreamed of in his philosophy…"

Churchill: "… he [Wolseley] made his plans for a methodical and deliberate advance which would leave nothing to luck … He excluded the idea of a wild glorious rush which might result in astonishing success or terrible disaster." (Churchill, The River War)

Wolseley: "… the real power of an army rests on its ability in marching well …" (45)

Britannica: "After learning of two victories won by Wolseley's advancing forces, al-Mahdi's troops were on the verge of raising the siege; but the further unaccountable delay of the relief force encouraged them to make a final, successful assault at a gap in the ramparts caused by the falling of the Nile's waters. The city's garrison was butchered, Gordon with it." (Online encyclopedia entry)

Wolseley: "As the months of 1862 went by, the universal feeling was one of impatience and restlessness at what was deemed the waste of time and the useless delay which were taking place." (112)

Lytton Strachey: “The delay of the expedition was even more serious than Gordon had supposed. Lord Wolseley had made the most elaborate preparations. He had collected together a picked army of 10,000 of the finest British troops; he had arranged a system of river transports with infinite care. For it was his intention to take no risks; he would advance in force up the Nile; he had determined that the fate of Gordon should not depend upon the dangerous hazards of a small and hasty exploit.” (Strachey, Eminent Victorians)

Wolseley: "What most strikes the regular soldier … is the inefficient manner in which both he [Lee] and his opponents were often served by their subordinate commanders…" (64)

Churchill: "Sir Charles Wilson, [Wolseley’s subordinate] having collected his force, remained three days by the bank of the Nile before attempting any further advance on Khartoum. […] On the fourth day he embarked on two of Gordon's steamers. […] On the 27th of January the rescuers came in sight of Khartoum [two days after its storming]." (Churchill, The River War)

Wolseley: "… from a desire of leaving nothing to chance, he [McClellan] has not succeeded in anything." (46)

Edward M. Spiers: "Meanwhile British soldiers felt immensely frustrated about the outcome of the relief expedition. If they were less critical of Wolseley’s planning and staff system than some historians have been, many felt that their mission had begun too late, and that they had struggled up the Nile and defeated the Mahdi’s forces in several battles to little effect." (Spiers: The Victorian Soldier in Africa)

***

Charles Gordon: "It is, of course, on the cards that Khartoum is taken under the nose of the expeditionary force which will be just too late." (Siege journal)

(All Wolseley quotes from The American Civil War: An English View. Page numbers are in parens.)

Part 1 of this series
Part 2 of this series

Fixing history at Jamestown

Here's an inspirational story about a deep reader named William Kelso.

A graduate student at the nearby College of William and Mary when he first visited the island [Jamestown], he was unconvinced by the park ranger's spiel.

Excellent starting point: park rangers represent authorized opinion and in this case pointed towards a rotten consensus.

Kelso, seeing the site of Jamestown Civil War fort, tapping into the eternal logic of fort sitings, suspected that the received wisdom on the location of Jamestown fort (underwater) was incompetent. Good for him and us.

Let's take up our own convictions now and keep at it.

Civil War revenge movie

It stars two Irishmen in what appears to be a spaghetti Western knockoff.

ACW publishing in 2006

I have been going through the sales numbers and have found some interesting developments, enough for a series next week.

Will wrap up Romney and Nile then as well.

McPherson and the Atlantic

Kevin Levin seems disappointed in the new McPherson book, citing especially the quality of analysis. He has applied some care and thought to his review. Compare it to the usual senseless outpouring flowing from, for instance, the L.A. Times:

"In This Mighty Scourge — a riveting collection of 16 masterfully written essays — James M. McPherson again demonstrates that he is our greatest historian of the war."

Give him credit, the man attracts excess. Not just from me.

There was a story recently in the Atlantic magazine about the Oxford University Press history series into which McPherson's Battle Cry was plugged by his Johns Hopkins mentor, C. Vann Woodward (editor of the series). Did you know, for instance that "The author originally slated to write the volume on the Civil War, Willie Lee Rose, suffered a stroke in 1978."

Does the author of the Atlantic piece, in this "sweeping indictment against American historians" include McPherson when he says of the Oxford series, "not only are the Americans unconscionably tardy; their entries conspicuously lack the intellectual refinement, analytic sharpness, and stylistic verve" of the stuff published on the British history side? Mind you, this fellow is the literary editor of the magazine!

The article carries a measure of cynicism towards Woodward's editorship. "...nearly a half-century later, only five of a projected 11 volumes in the Oxford History of the United States have been completed." It dwells on the good work he rejected.

Gordon Wood is quoted as saying "The idea that you can sum up the scholarship of a previous generation in one volume just doesn't hold anymore." He means one narrative volume.

Wood is giving others' views here - mainly mine, though I can't imagine how he got them. (But let's be clear: in the case of Battle Cry, it is not the scholarship of the previous generation - it is the pop history of the previous generation being summarized.)

Anyway, read the piece.

A bridge too far for Stonewall (2/3)

Jackson can always turn up a winner with a little writerly help:

Robert G. Tanner, Stonewall in the Valley:
"Yet Jackson was not entirely dissatisfied with his progress to date [1/5/62]. Communications between the Alleghenies and the Potomac were severed..."

Russel Beatie, Army of the Potomac Vol. 2:
"Murray then brought Ashby to Lander in the telegraph office [at Hancock, 1/5/62]. Concerned that Ashby might understand telegraphic signals, Lander moved the group to another room..." "Lander telegraphed for reinforcements [on 1/5/62] ..." "He pressed Banks [in the neighboring department by telegraph] to ask McClellan for permission to cross and engage [Jackson] ..."

Tanner:
"... and the Federals were probably misled as to the true Southern objective [Romney]."

Beatie:
"McClellan, Banks, and Lander all knew that Jackson did not mean to retreat. He intended to withdraw, turn west, cross the mountains, recapture Romney..." [Cites McC telegram alerting
Romney commander on 1/7/62.]

Hmmm. Communications not cut - not out of Hancock nor Romney. Federals not misled either. Thanks again, Russel Beatie.

Madame, fix your kepi!

Or is this some sort of war-flavored stylization going on?
(Miss Olivia Rand, 186?)

"Romney Campaign" revised

I have revised the post "A bridge too far for Stonewall" for clarity and you can see the changes in brackets. This first part sets up two historiographical questions: why is Stonewall dominating accounts of this affair (my answer will not be what you expect); and why is this called the "Romney Campaign."

Robert Tanner and Russel Beatie will figure extensively in the answer to these questions.

It's raining new ACW blogs

Without making a systematic survey, I notice the following ACW-related blogs have sprouted:

The Battle of Franklin - This tends to be informational rather than analytical. The author is anonymous.

The Adjutant's Blog - Tony Zusman takes re-enacting online. I notice burnout is a recurrent theme here.

Southern Heritage News and Views - "In Defense of Southern Heritage & Faith!" The blogger is anonymous.

Not In Memoriam, But In Defense - Student "Sarah" explores "how is the radicalization and organizational shift that is occurring in the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) altering the physical landscape of Richmond, Virginia."

The Tredegar Iron Works - This is Brett Schulte's new ACW gaming blog. This seems to be a supplement or "back office" to this site.

Battlefield Biker - By "bb." "Situated at the intersection of Motorcycle Touring and Military History and their relationships to Current Events." This is a topically segmented blog and the link given takes you to the ACW blog content.

Resonance on the Nile (2/3)

Garnet Wolseley (lower right) was probably the British Empire’s most successful general, both on the battlefield and in career terms.

In the movie Khartoum, his personal relationship with Charles Gordon is obscured; a cabinet officer suggests Gordon be sent to the Sudan and the Prime Minister Gladstone character endorses the idea. The Gladstone character then meets Gordon at the train station for a send-off. Later, when a rescue decision is made, the film portrays Wolseley as operating under secret orders from Gladstone not to approach Khartoum/Gordon too quickly or too near.

Shades of that purported "Grand Conspiracy" to keep Mac out of Richmond!

In reality it was Wolseley himself who recruited his friend Gordon to go to Khartoum and sent him off. But Wolseley’s choice of route for his relief expedition was so strange that delay may have produced a conspiracy meme to understand his bizarre decisions. More on that next time when we match his actions as reliever against the ACW analyses he wrote.

What is interesting is that Wolseley placed Gordon on a pedestal sized to match the one he built for Robert E. Lee. In 1887, he wrote, “I have met but two men who realized my ideas of what a true hero should be: my friend Charles Gordon was one, General Lee was the other.”

Wolseley wrote a great deal about the American Civil War, first as an observer who spent time with Lee and McClellan (he was about McClellan’s age), and then as a commentator/reviewer on the Battles and Leaders series. I have isolated some of his views: direct quotes are in marks, otherwise I paraphrased. Note that his first-hand impressions ended in early ’63.

On Rebel cavalry
They attained first class status as irregular cavalry; there was no attempt to drill them or train them as anything else and they became the best of that type. The Union went wrong in pursuing a conventional cavalry path and thereby failed to achieve competence as irregular or regular cavalry. “… their puzzled [Yankee] enemy, clogged with all the routine of drill, without officers able to direct it, or soldiers sufficiently instructed to perform it, is trying in vain to discover their whereabouts.” (1863)

On efficiency
“What strikes the regular soldier in these campaigns of General Lee is the inefficient manner in which both he and his opponents were served by their subordinate commanders, and how badly the staff and outpost work was performed on both sides.” (1863)

On Civil War armies
“It is most difficult to move with any effective precision young armies constituted as these were during the war. The direction and movement of large bodies of newly raised troops, even when victorious, is never easy, is often impossible.” (1863).

On railroad delivery of men to battlefields
It is an error to believe such and is perpetrated by Beauregard’s account of Bull Run. For artillery and cavalry, this is impossible. For infantry, highly improbable because train order of movement and debarkation will produce a hodge-podge of forces. (1883)

On civilian (public) opinion
It was “… the true criminal.” “… he [public opinion] took into his ignorant hands the entire conduct of this part [1861] of the war.” (1883)

On the Lincoln/Stanton military policy
“Go straight at the enemy at the very point where he expects you… Let everyone know what you are going to do, so that we may announce it in the public press, and chuckle and crow over your coming victory. Scatter your forces in as many directions as possible, so that the enemy may always be able to bring superior forces against you. Arrange your force so that it is rigidly tied to one particular point, and that the enemy cannot doubt where you will be. Go ahead without preparation, forethought, or care; only let us hear that you are moving, so that the newspapers may brag.” (Date unknown, after 1883)

He records a friend’s reaction to reading Stanton’s orders to Pope: “… he literally ‘laughed until he cried,’ and never fully understood what the expression meant until doing so.” (After 1883)

On Lincoln’s lack of civil policies
“The safe retention of private property is made to depend upon the will and pleasure of some petty provost marshal of the neighborhood – a functionary who has also the power of consigning the owners, and perhaps their families” to prison. “Tyranny and illegal arrests have stricken them [under occupation] with terror.” “Every species of minor annoyance has been resorted to by federal authorities.” (1863)

Previous post here.

Hat tip

... to author Kenneth Noe for this link. Myself, I would lose my mind trying to teach ACW history to young people.

New Boyd exegesis

Chet Richards reviews a new entirely theoretical analysis of John Boyd's work - no distracting biography or narrative elements here.

Readers of this blog know that I use Boydian constructs to locate the present-day U.S. Army in the Civil War in terms of its culture. Have a look at Richards' review.

A bridge too far for Stonewall (1/3)

[This post has been revised on 1/16/07. Revisions are in brackets.]

Am rather disoriented by this news story - the reporter jumbled a lot of unfamiliar information together producing a messy recap. The newspaper's capsule history reads:

... Jackson's forces drove Union soldiers out of Bath, Va., shelled Hancock, Md., and marched on Romney, Va. Thanks to his surprise attacks in January 1862, Jackson met with success, driving out Union soldiers and cutting off their supply lines by briefly controlling the Potomac River, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Later that month, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered Jackson's men out of Romney after some of Jackson's soldiers complained of harsh conditions to Davis.

[The actual events are these, allowing for a little CWBN spin: Jackson advanced on and succeeded in occupying Bath, on the Va. side of the Potomac. That's what "driving out Union soldiers" refers to. In fact, they were not driven, they set up a defense on the Maryland side of the river before he arrived. After Frederick Lander (photo, right) defeated Jackson's attempts to cross at Hancock, his Union pursuit with an inferior force caught up with and mauled the Rebel rear guard and supply wagons. The retreating Jackson eventually escaped Lander and occupied an abandoned Union post at Romney. (Romney had been the object of a campaign proposed by Jackson in November, but his plans had gone terribly wrong.) Jackson then split his forces. Loring's Army of the Northwest was ordered out of amentity-free Romney after Jackson's army had gone into comfortable winter quarters at Winchester. Lander immediately occupied the place, again with an inferior force.]

May I propose a simpler way of saying this: Jackson advanced on the B and O railroad; his crossing of the Potomac was defeated by Frederick Lander; Lander launched a counteroffensive routing Jackson's men; Jackson then [raced] Lander for a town called Romney in Jackson's own rear area. [It became Jackson's rear area after he left Winchester and arrived at Bath. At that point Romney and Winchester were both in his rear area. Romney was also the eastern edge of Rosecrans' domain.]

[Wikipedia timeline deleted.]

And yet, this is not the "Hancock campaign," or the "B&O Campaign," much less "the Retreat to Winchester," - it is the "Romney Campaign," Romney being a secondary objective after the railroad campaign fails. Romney is designated winter quarters for Loring's brigades.

Is there an "Alexandria Campaign" named for federal soldiers placed into winter quarters there? How do you make this campaign so Jackson-centric, without portraying it as a series of failures culminating in resignation of his commission? He is defeated. He retreats. He evacuates winter quarters. He resigns his commission.

[I want to explore the Jackson-centricity and the Romney naming in my next post.]

Note [in most histories] the Union side seems to be a leaderless collection of odds and ends. The federals are maguffins, plot devices, literary elements needed to play off the main (Jackson) story. [More on this next.]

A few notes from Beatie on this in the next post.

***

p.s. Brett Schulte on Rankin's book on the "Romney Campaign" here. "The book traces Jackson's unsuccessful campaign to take back some of the northwestern Virginia counties wrested away by George McClellan late in 1861." "... the troops involved came out of it with their confidence in their commander greatly shaken..." In Brett's synopsis, the aim of the "campaign" is Romney, with detours to Bath and Hancock.

p.p.s. Will Keene writes to say "Jackson's correspondence during December 1861 makes it clear that Romney was a primary target. " He does not like the characterization of Romney as being in Jackson's rear, either. More on this next.

Rick Beard makes a move

Motionless as a spider on a web, the mysterious ALPLM chieftain Rick Beard has finally made a move. If this is his move.

Kay Smith has been chosen to lead the bicentennial celebrations in Illinois. Not enough of her background is disclosed here to tell us if she is a political hack or a competent professional.

For the prospective author

Pick your literary agent.

Resonance on the Nile (1/3)

Got into a funny mood Friday and decided to watch Khartoum. Wanted to see how Twelver doctrines would be managed by Hollywood in 1966. (A taste or two of scotch suggested this might be fun research.) Wonderful surprise: streams of Civil War associations flowing through most every Cineramic scene.

In the first place there is the Garnet Wolseley character. Wolseley was probably the highest ranking foreigner to extensively analyze the ACW. He was personal friends with Lee, whom he idolized, and he spent time with all of Lee's generals as well as McClellan. An intense admirer of Jacksonian dash, his relief of Khartoum was portrayed in the film as mixture of time-wasting over-preparation mixed with a professionalism that embraced the political treachery of his civilian superiors.

Next, there is the Prime Minister Gladstone character, portrayed as a blend of Lincolnian populism and Stantonish doubledealing. The real Gladstone we remember as a hawk favoring intervention in the ACW and author of the phrase, Jeff Davis had "made a nation." In the film, this Gladstone lives out the old charges that Lincoln held back McClellan by holding back the relief of Khartoum with politically expedient instructions to Wolseley.

At the center of the film is the Charles "Chinese" Gordon character (right), who made his name at the head of "The Ever Victorious Army." This Ever Victorious Army served the Manchus and was recruited, trained, fought, and it earned its name under the greatest American Civil War general who never was, Frederick Townsend Ward, killed leading an attack on September 22nd 1862. That Gordon could fill Ward's shoes "made him" in the publicity sense. (By the way, try matching the record of your favorit ACW division against that of the "Ever Victorious" for an eye opening experience.)

Gordon's Civil War connection was with William Wing Loring. Egypt had colonized the Sudan and Gordon served Egypt as governor there at the same time that Loring served Egypt as its chief general. Both men were caught up in the Ethiopian invasion of Egypt in 1875; Gordon, on a peace mission was imprisoned, resigning his post on release. Loring was sacked after a military disaster at the hands of the Ethiopians.

The film starts 10 years after the Loring/Gordon windup. The Gordon character is sent on an impossible mission with no resources and total responsibility. On screen he is given to less bombast than the real item. He drinks brandy, reads the Bible, drinks brandy, prays, drinks brandy, takes some extravagant risk, etc. It's a nice rythm that lasts until his head is placed on a stick. Speeches, Gordon has none. He does get into dueling monologues with the Hidden One.

The Mahdi character (right) is over the top, but Olivier somehow makes us accept him after a few scenes. He has to be compelling and viable in terms of viewer interest while being merciless, self-absorbed, prickly, unstable, and prone to rhetoric as fresh as today's Jihadi websites. A prescient portrayal, this is the one major character who has no connection with the ACW. His connection to pop history is worth a word, however.

In the 1950s and '60s accounts of the Mahdi's revolt, pop historians (as always) were obsessed about troubling readers with detail; they avoided their duty to explain how a Shi'ite Twelfth Imam or Hidden Imam revolt would break out in in Sunni Sudan, applying a misleading emphasis on the Mahdi's "dervish" props (e.g., patched cloaks). Applying a "dervish" label to the movement solves a literary problem as dervishes are exotics populating both sides of the Muslim divide.

I still don't know how a Twelver revolt started there, but at least Khartoum, the movie, strips away every vestige of this historians' expedient. That there are other liberties taken in the film - well, I'm willing to grant those in exchange for purging the word "dervish." The film simply presents the Mahdi character "as he is" - mysterious. Good enough.

This seems like the time to visit Wolseley's comments on the Civil War and match them against his Khartoum expedition leadership. Will post on that soon.

The slave quilt code fracas

In the nearly 10 years that Civil War Book News has been running (it's being revamped as you read this), one book has towered over all others in sales. That book is Hidden in Plain View, a sui generis work conveying to the public the claims of a specific woman about her family history and heritage.

The story includes a quilting communication code described by a certain Ms. Williams of South Carolina, who characterized it as passed down from slavery times. The code contains escape information and is coherent, specific and detailed enough to be analyzable. Indeed, the NSA actually had an exhibit based on the data:

... 17 patterns are thought to have been used in the secret slave quilt codes. They ranged from patterns relating advice, such as the Flying Geese, to others that sent direct messages. The slaves memorized a poem that listed each of the different patterns.

The presentation of this information is literary and resembles the wonderful anthropological work of Richard and Sally Price during the 1990s. This is what you do with a single source of information.

The authors of Hidden in Plain View thus delivered to historians a starting point for some potentially very interesting research. But all I see around me is historians behaving badly.

My first clue appeared in Kevin Levin's blog - Kevin says he knows nothing about the matter but characterizes the underlying material as "myth" and "nonsense"apparently on the strength of postings made by Ralph Luker. Looking up Kevin's link to Luker I see one post tangentially addressing the matter. The strongest part says,

... the UNLV faculty member, Donovan Conley, ignored the advice of historians, such as David Blight, and allowed his student, Theodore Ransaw, to perpetuate the quilt/code myth in a thesis, "Points of Contact: Nineteenth Century Visual Rhetoric of the Underground Railroad."

This has the makings of a good argument against a lad's thesis but can hardly address the slave quilt coding issue. Consider the underpinnings in this quote: "He's [the student is] discovering an inherent problem with the project: the lack of primary research materials,"

I laughed when I read that.

Hidden in Plain View created a single historical record by documenting what purports to be one family's oral tradition. The monkey was placed on our backs to conduct more interviews and collect additional folklore - not to muck around in archives looking for notarized accounts of secret codes and then petulantly declaring - "No corroboration, must be lies."

A particularly curious post on this matter was put up by Oscar Chamberlain at HNN, worth your notice: "It has a superficial plausibility, unless one knows enough about quilt making to immediately be dubious." No it is deeply plausible because this purported oral tradition is rich in detail. It requires nothing in the way of quilt making knowledge.

This debunker gets close to transacting some real business when writing: "A key phrase in Ozella Williams's Quilt Code is Double Wedding Rings, but that quilt pattern was invented in the 1920s." Good. We're getting somewhere. But to complete our job we need to doublecheck our belief that it dates from the 1920s while keeping in mind that 100-year-old oral traditions will accrete neologisms and other asynchronous material.

The main problem comes down to failure in historical research following up Hidden in Plain View. And that is not the authors' problem. I note that many more purported oral traditions have turned up since but that they fail to correlate exactly to the code in Hidden and that this is held up by historians as a case against slave coding in quilts. How absurd.

The most comprehensive critical recap of the literature appears here. Notice that stories are still being told. Data is being collected. The only sensible debunking possible is claim-by-claim based on the internal integrity of the material. Meanwhile if you correlate different oral traditions and get differences, this only challenges the idea of a universal coding scheme not multiple or parallel traditions.

At the very least, apart from any code itself, you have as basis for study the question of whether there is an oral tradition for the existence of slave quilt coding.

The safest thing one can say is that not enough material has been collected and therefore that its historical interpretation is premature.

It may even be possible that people volunteering coding legends are false memory cases like alien abductees... but that has to be tested one storyteller at a time.

What on earth must anthropolgists think, looking at this display of history-as-social-science, I wonder.

A new ACW blog

This one has a Virginia flavor. And author Richard Williams is posting at a solid clip.

See here for a post about the mass evictions from the Valley to form the national park - 2,800 people disposessed by force in a stunning prelude to Kelo.

The jig is up when your own government says of you "... the people who inhabited these mountains were living as animals and needed to be civilized."

More on Jim Lane's hair

"Lane was trying to convey an image of a hard-working congressman, more concerned with freeing the slaves than controlling his locks."

Hmmmm.

Doings at "Civil Warriors"

Very interesting doings at "Civil Warriors," worth a couple of comments at least.

On the content side
Ethan Rafuse asks "how long, if ever, does it take for historical opinion on an aspect of the Civil War to change?" I have a short answer. Rafuse, Harsh, Reese, and Beatie have written books that future writers must address or appear foolish. Change happens from here on out. When some Taaffe plunges forward while ignoring Rafuse, Harsh, Beatie, and Reese, then bloggers and the new media step in - the empowered reader ladles out ridicule, catalogs the errors of ommission and suppression, and slings a few choice words in earshot of publishers.

(BTW, I was at a book signing five years ago in which the author practically begged us to put in a good comment on Amazon for him since his publishers read comments and the postings were running against him.)

On a similar note, a friend just received a letter from a marquee brand author (Centennialist) who had been surfing his website; the author felt threatened enough to send a letter asking that a certain piece of documentary evidence (presented in image form) be rationalized away (or suppressed). It was damaging to the name brand author's work. My friend answered on the lines of, "So write a rebuttal yourself." Change is coming.

Rafuse wittily posts more on the subject here. Mark Grimsley chimes in with this excellent post, which takes me to the next point.

On the media side
Mark has written an optimal post; it has an anecdote, historiography, and some fun cross-disciplinary analysis while referencing (dialog style) Rafuse's earlier blog entry. But if you look to the bottom of the post, you get some fairly long-form comments. They ruin the spell of the entry.

The effect is worse on Ethan's charming post: the comments are staccato outbursts that startle the reader out of a reverie the author has created.

My blog's comments function stays off. That's a New Year's resolution I think I can keep.

(Hat tip to Harry for pointing me at this series.)

The chairman as re-enactor

A certain elderly gentleman recently passed away and we know he is a relic of olden days because he was both the history department chair at a college and a Civil War re-enactor. When will that happen again?

Secondary sources

Thanks to J. David Petruzzi for so well understanding my position on ACW narrative.

The tech breakthrough of 2007

Coming to a library near you this year: print-on-demand book vending machines. No kidding!

If the machine acts like an ATM, calling a databank and downloading a file, the number of titles available could be enormous.

Another hat tip to POD-DY Mouth.

Dynamic pricing at Amazon

Those $$$ increases applied to "save for later" are not coming from publishers.

Hat tip: POD-DY Mouth.

Buford reminds us

One of the more paradoxical Centennial constructs is that McClellan was “complex” while his situation was simple, requiring of him choices so clear that the most ignorant reader chafes at his “failures.” This helps define a “McClellan problem” in the narrator’s “plot” – one which the writer helpfully fixes by eventually inserting a “simple” Grant character into that “simple” context. Simple matches simple and all those decisions now flow into the resolution of the Civil War.

Naturally this makes N.B. Buford’s appointment to command the AoP a problem – something to keep at arm’s length. We had speculated here about the Buford offer reported by Rafuse. Why was it vetted with Orville Browning? Now, Russel Beatie tells us in his forthcoming book that it was Stanton who suggested to Orville Browning that the AoP be given to Napoleon Buford. The source is a Browning diary entry on April 2, 1862. Leave it to Rafuse and Beatie to share this kind of information.

I wish they had spent more time on the matter, however, because one cannot just give the reader stuff like this and trust him to recognize and enjoy it. The reader’s framework has been shaped by 50 years of seamless Centennial storytelling from which all distractions (context) have been carefully snipped.

We can fix that right here, though.

Stanton’s offer was delivered to Browning in this way: “If you will propose to the President…I will second the appointment.” Not only is the offer significant in its form and significant because it so closely follows Stanton’s failure to recruit Ethan Hitchcock for the job, but the date itself also tells much.

Within the “complex McClellan” construct is a meme that GBM as army commander did himself out of a simple job by wearing down the easy goodwill of Lincoln and Stanton. As AoP commander, he provoked their frustration and earned their wrath.

Baldy Smith (no less) felt forced to confront this meme – embedded like most Centennial "insights" in the Republican Party press of that day - as soon as McClellan’s obituaries were published. He wrote a long letter-to-the-editor of a paper contradicting the idea that Stanton was Mac’s friend until Mac earned his enmity on the field. It’s a good letter and I’ll run it here soon. Its two main points will serve us here. Smith says: (1) McClellan knew he was a dead man walking before the sealift but (2) He was confident he could win the victories that would sideline all attacks.

I say this to establish McClellan’s motives while operating under what we might agree were impossible conditions. Put it another way: just as Grant told Schofield he would not be McClellanized by Lincoln or Stanton in 1864, McClellan here told Smith he would essentially “Grantify” himself against attacks from Lincoln and Stanton in 1862.

This Buford matter is unhelpful to a second Centennial meme - that Stanton and Lincoln were a cooperative and effective team. Note that Stanton, the president’s advisor, is here smuggling his advice to Lincoln through the agency of a cutout whom he perceives to be a close friend of the president. Look Browning, Buford will be your idea and I’ll second it.

Now, consider that McClellan’s March 11 demotion was incomplete - that being fired from general-in-chief was only part of the larger business, the other half not being finished before the water movement began. The demotion order was composed the day of a fiery speech to the cabinet in which Stanton denounced his "great ignorance, negligence, and lack of order and subordination - and reckless extravagance." On the 15th, Hitchcock paraded before Lincoln as potential commander of the AoP – he recorded, with horror, Lincoln’s reference to “the traitor, McClellan.” And to his credit he refused the position. This is another problem for Centennial memes, hence its long habitation in the trash bin.

A Congressional move to fire McClellan altogether was barely sidetracked on March 17th, five days after GBM learned he has lost his top job, two days after Hitchcock refused the AoP for the last time and 16 days before Stanton solicited Browning for Buford.

If we assume Stanton was no fool, it tells us something that he believed about Lincoln, that as of April 2nd, the day after McClellan personally set sail, Lincoln might still be willing to fire McClellan from his AoP command.

Not that he would leave the president to make up his own mind.

For on this same April 2nd, the Radical general Wadsworth responded to a Stanton inquiry that the capital was not sufficiently protected. Stanton told Lincoln about it on the second. And Lincoln then (April 3) put the freeze on the embarkation of McDowell and the bulk of McClellan’s cavalry. In the mood contrived for him, who knows how he might have responded to "Browning's" suggestions regarding Buford.

So we find Stanton encircling Lincoln with third-party reports and with third-party candidates for command while Congress moves to resolve McClellan be fired.

No wonder some say that civil war can be complicated. The adventures of Napoleon B. Buford are a reminder of that.

(More on NBB via Eric Wittenberg here.)

"An acute expert problem" in ACW history

Nicholas Taleb is not just a daring probability theorist, he understands our core problems in the last 50 years of Civil War history:

Some academic circles can suffer from an acute expert problem producing cosmetic but fake knowledge, particularly in narrative disciplines...

Narrative discipline: discipline that consists in fitting a convincing and well-sounding story to the past (history, statistics, political science). Opposed to experimental discipline ...

Narrative fallacy: our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts.

Retrospective distortion: Examining past events without adjusting for the forward passage of time. It leads to the illusion of posterior predictability.

It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

Hat tip to John Robb.

A contagion spread by fans (cont.)

Out of his own pocket, a developer financed a Civil War marker at his shopping center. But he couldn't see past his own fannishness.

The passing shoppers have some dim idea that Eisenhower once led his Leathernecks over yon swale to attack Cochise in the battle of Saipan. They could be helped a little by an inscription that says, "In [year], Union Army [name] marched past this point on its way to [insert historically intelligible destiny here]."

They are hardly prepared for the outbreak of military history the marker delivers: "In the winter of 1862-1863 following the Battle of Fredericksburg, Col. Edward Harland's Union brigade camped on this site. Six infantry regiments comprised the brigade: the 4th Rhode Island and the 8, 11, 15, 16 and 21st Connecticut. The brigade had been held in reserve at Fredericksburg and took just 40 casualties there, many from Union artillery shells that exploded prematurely overhead."

As a colleague once persisted, "Rhode Island: that's part of New York, right?"

I suppose there's even more on the plaque but as my daughter would say, this is already "Way too much information, Dad."

Contagion spread by fans

One legacy of 50 years of Centennial nonfiction has been a deformed readership - deformed in its sensibilities.

The Civil War reader of pop narratives turns her hand to fiction and evokes this:

... the novel's essential weakness lies in the characters, who tend to stand out like monuments, especially the gruff, cigar-chewing Sherman and the swashbuckling brigade commander Thomas Ransom. They are beyond criticism, remaining largely unchallenged and unknown, alienated from the reader by their own legendary status.

As they would be in any Civil War nonfiction you would pick up. Old wine in new bottles.

It is as if the author's personal enthusiasm for these historical figures has blinded her to the emotional needs of the reader.

In the historical "literature" she reads now, they have already been assigned their roles and status - she dare not tamper with them. The result is, "a novel ill at ease with its own material"

Using the new publishing tech

This is what print-on-demand (and digital publishing) is for:

* Multi-year, complex research projects, rich in data,
* Total authorial control over production and design,
* Aimed at a pre-existing audiences.

For this, therefore, to be brought out by a conventional publisher is preposterous.

Index, 2003-2006 (version 1.0)

Index to series appears at the bottom of the post.

AHA (see also Hoffer)
10/3/2003, 11/19/04, 1/7/05, 1/18/05, 2/8/05, 3/10/05, 3/11/05, 4/29/05

ALPLM
9/19/03, 6/24/04, 7/8/04, 7/16/04, 7/26/04, 10/27/04, 12/1/04, 12/27/04, 1/4/05, 1/20/05, 3/28/05, 4/11/05, 4/12/05, 4/18/05, 4/19/05, 4/26/05, 4/28/05, 5/19/05, 6/24/05, 7/7/05, 7/14/05, 8/15/05, 10/11/05, 12/11/06

ALPLM and Richard Norton Smith
9/30/06, 10/6/03, 10/9/03, 10/10/03, 11/26/03, 12/18/03, 2/4/04, 2/6/04, 2/10/04, 2/12/04, 3/1/04, 3/17/04, 3/18/04, 3/22/04, 4/14/04, 6/4/04, 6/15/04, 8/24/04, 10/6/04, 12/1/04, 2/14/05, 2/18/05, 12/6/05, 2/16/06, 2/17/06

ALPLM and Rick Beard
10/30/06, 10/31/06, 11/25/06, 12/18/06

APSA
12/16/05

Absenteeism (Rebel)
12/26/03, 6/29/06, 7/3/06

Absenteeism (Union, see also “Numbers and Losses”)
11/17/03, 6/2/04

Albert (chess master)
10/26/04

Alito (jurist)
1/12/06

American Heritage (magazine)
9/20/05, 6/23/06, 7/4/06

Aubrecht (blogger)
2/3/06, 2/14/06,

Ayers (author)
8/19/05, 9/16/05, 10/5/05, 10/17/05, 11/2/05, 1/20/06, 2/3/06, 4/3/06

Ball’s Bluff (battle)
1/20/06

Banks (general)
5/31/06

Baseball - ACW
3/31/05, 4/4/05, 5/17/05

Battlefield guides
9/1/03

Baudrillard (philosopher)
10/14/04, 10/15/04, 10/18/04, 2/11/05, 9/8/05

Bearss (author)
8/17/05

Beatie (author)
10/8/03, 11/10/04, 11/11/04, 1/4/05, 1/5/05, 3/22/05, 3/30/05, 3/31/05, 4/6/05, 4/28/05, 5/9/05, 9/12/05, 10/18/05, 4/14/06, 5/17/06, 6/28/06, 8/12/06, 8/18/06, 9/17/06, 10/12/06, 11/03/06, 11/19/06, 12/19/06

Benko (chess master)
11/18/05, 11/21/05

Bierce (author)
6/9/04, 1/10/05, 5/16/05

Bloch
11/11/03

Blogs of the ACW
5/21/04, 12/6/04, 2/1/05, 2/24/05, 3/11/05, 3/17/05, 6/27/05, 9/6/05, 10/7/05, 11/30/05, 1/16/06, 3/13/06, 3/21/06, 5/19/06, 7/17/06, 9/21/06, 9/25/06, 10/12/06, 11/10/06, 11/14/06, 11/17/06, 12/20/06

Blunt (general)
12/11/05, 12/12/05

Bonekemper (author)
5/12/04, 8/22/05, 4/18/06

Boritt (author)
2/16/04, 10/30/06, 12/5/06

Boyd (military theorist)
6/28/04, 10/1/04, 5/6/05, 6/6/05, 7/8/05

Brady (photographer)
1/23/06, 10/18/06

Brautigan (author)
1/20/06,

Brooks (author)
4/18/06, 4/20/06

Brooksher (author)
5/9/06, 5/22/06

Brown (author)
7/11/05

Brown (revolutionary)
11/25/03, 8/18/04

Buchanan (president)
5/5/05, 7/26/05

Buchanan’s “Public Man”
7/26/05

Buell (author)
9/21/05

Buford N (general)
10/13/05, 10/14/05

Bundy (author)
2/27/06

Bunting (author)
11/24/04, 8/22/05, 4/18/06

Burns (TV producer)
9/16/05, 10/5/05, 10/27/06

Burnside (general, see also “Sprague”)
11/5/03, 1/29/04, 2/4/04, 12/6/04, 2/1/05, 8/2/05

Burton (author)
7/4/06

Butler (general, see also Robertson)
11/10/04, 8/4/05, 1/4/06, 10/18/06

Butterfield (philosopher)
9/26/05, 9/27/05

Butternut & Blue (publisher)
10/7/03

CSA (movie)
12/3/03, 3/2/05, 9/16/05, 10/10/05, 8/2/06, 10/1/06

C-SPAN
8/16/04

CVBT
12/22/05,

CWPT
3/2/04, 3/3/04, 3/4/04, 3/5/04, 3/6/04, 3/7/04, 3/10/04, 3/16/04, 4/6/04, 4/7/04, 4/8/04, 6/4/04, 8/13/04, 9/22/04, 9/24/04, 1/11/05, 1/12/05, 2/22/05, 2/24/05, 2/25/05, 3/17/05, 4/1/05, 4/27/05, 4/29/05, 5/5/05, 11/15/05, 12/12/05, 12/30/05, 1/31/06, 2/15/06, 2/21/06, 3/1/06, 3/8/06, 6/21/06, 9/29/06

Carhart (author)
4/28/05, 11/22/52

Catton (author)
9/22/04, 11/11/04, 12/13/04, 12/14/04, 4/29/05, 5/5/05, 3/16/06, 5/31/06

Causes of the ACW
12/9/03

Cavalry doctrine (see also series)
1/17/05, 1/4/06, 8/28/06

Centennialism (also Nevins, Catton, Williams, McPherson, et al)
9/10/03, 9/12/03, 4/12/05, 1/20/06, 6/20/06, 7/4/06

Chamberlain (general)
2/4/04, 6/3/06

Cheney (veep)
1/26/04, 5/13/04

Citations, electronic media
4/7/06, 9/7/06

Clark (politician) as McClellan
10/1/03, 10/2/03, 10/28/03, 3/30/04, 11/2/04, 8/24/05

Clay (Whig)
6/11/04

Clemens (author)
4/22/04, 5/11/05

Cline (blogger)
9/3/03, 9/4/03, 9/22/04, 5/25/05

Clinton (author)
11/22/05

Cold Mountain (movie)
10/30/03, 12/11/03, 12/16/03, 12/17/03, 12/18/03, 12/21/03, 12/24/03, 12/25/03, 12/29/03, 2/6/04, 2/10/04

Collier (author)
7/6/04

Comments, blog
4/28/06

Comte de Paris, diary
9/8/06

Confederate flags
10/14/03, 11/25/03, 12/4/03, 2/24/04, 8/26/04, 9/3/04, 9/7/04

Conflicts of interest (authors)
2/25/04, 2/26/04, 2/27/04

Connelly (author)
5/18/06, 6/27/06, 6/28/06, 11/3/06

Constitution (“pact with hell”)
9/29/05

Contingency, historical
4/14/05, 4/16/05, 1/23/06, 1/24/06, 2/9/06

Cormack (blogger)
5/24/05, 7/8/05, 9/19/05

Cotton trading (illegal, see also Sprague, Chase, McDowell)
5/19/04, 6/22/04, 7/21/05, 9/12/06

Cramer (blogger)
10/5/05

Crampton’s Gap (see also Reese)
10/6/03, 1/14/04, 3/30/04, 4/30/04, 8/25/05, 12/8/04, 1/6/05, 1/20/05, 2/14/05, 2/15/05, 2/16/05, 6/13/05, 12/15/05, 1/6/09, 1/13/06, 1/18/06

Crane (author)
2/18/04

Cricket (American game)
8/23/05

Crimean War (see also Moten and “Cavalry Doctrine” series)
4/21/04

Cross (bolgger)
9/30/05

Cult of celebrity
10/23/03

Custer (general)
4/11/05

Dail (blogger)
3/27/06, 9/21/06

Darien (GA)
5/29/06, 5/30/06

Davis (author)
12/21/04, 5/25/05, 3/1/06, 8/7/06

Davis (secwar, see also series on “Cavalry Doctrine”)
1/17/05, 1/19/05, 8/28/06, 8/30/06

Davis (rebel)
9/7/05, 9/8/05

Decoration Day
5/31/04, 5/30/05

Denikin (general)
10/4/05

Dennison (governor)
11/24/03,

Desjardin (author)
12/8/03, 9/19/05, 10/24/05, 11/29/05

Detzer (author)
11/11/04, 8/7/06, 10/8/06

Dirck (blogger)
2/13/06

Doctorow (author)
8/17/05, 9/21/05, 4/17/06

Donald (author)
12/16/03, 3/26/04, 5/3/04, 9/12/05, 9/16/05, 5/5/06

Donizetti (composer, see also “Music”)
11/16/04

Doubleday (general)
8/24/06

Downey (blogger)
4/1/06, 8/30/06, 9/8/06, 9/22/06, 10/30/06

Economics and business of ACW
12/7/04, 7/13/05, 7/24/06, 7/31/06

Eicher (author)
8/11/05, 4/24/06

Eicher and Eicher (authors)
12/12/05, 2/7/06,

Emerson and Sumner
1/3/06

Ericsson (naval architect)
9/26/05

Fishel (author)
10/31/06

Fischer (author)
12/16/03, 9/15/04, 9/16/04, 9/17/04, 9/20/04, 9/21/04, 12/20/04, 8/25/05

Fitness
9/20/05, 9/30/05

Fleming (author)
6/28/04, 7/13/04

Foote (author)
11/25/03, 11/11/04, 12/9/04, 5/17/05, 6/29/05, 6/30/05, 7/13/05, 7/18/05, 7/21/05, 7/25/05, 8/5/05, 8/16/05, 9/29/05, 4/4/06

Ford’s Theatre
6/25/04

Franco-Prussian War
2/4/04

Franklin (general – see also Snell)
6/30/06

Fulgham (author)
10/12/05

Gallagher (author)
11/20/03, 2/9/04, 3/12/04, 7/23/04, 12/21/04, 3/28/05, 4/11/05, 4/27/05, 8/5/05, 9/12/05, 6/11/06, 7/26/06

Garfield (president)
1/21/05, 8/12/05

Gettysburg (address)
11/8/06, 11/9/06

Gettysburg (casino)
5/2/05, 5/16/05, 5/31/05, 10/5/05, 11/8/05, 4/6/06, 12/21/06

Gettysburg (movie)
7/30/04, 6/10/05

Ghosts
10/31/03

Gingrich and Forstchen (authors)
6/23/04, 7/5/04, 8/10/05, 4/20/06

Glasgow (author)
12/1/03

Glory (movie)
7/30/04

Gods and Generals (movie)
7/30/04

Goodwin (author)
9/20/04, 1/24/05, 7/12/05, 8/03/05, 8/19/05, 9/12/05, 9/30/05, 10/20/05, 10/25/05, 11/1/05, 11/16/05, 11/18/05, 11/28/05, 2/13/06

Goodwin (movie)
6/23/05, 7/12/05

Goss (author)
8/28/03, 9/21/03, 5/7/04, 12/17/04

Grant (general)
5/13/04, 9/20/04, 9/29/04, 11/24/04, 11/29/04, 2/3/05, 4/27/05, 5/2/05, 5/3/05, 5/5/05, 8/19/05, 9/14/05, 9/30/05, 1/2/06, 5/31/06, 12/19/06

Graves (author)
9/21/04, 9/22/04

Griffith (author)
2/9/06

Grimsley (author)
4/8/04, 8/11/04, 2/2/05, 2/3/05, 2/23/05, 2/24/05, 3/11/05, 3/17/05, 5/3/05, 5/20/05, 7/14/05, 8/4/05, 8/16/05, 8/18/05, 8/25/05, 9/9/05, 9/15/05, 11/6/05, 3/21/06, 5/31/06, 9/8/06, 10/12/06, 10/22/06, 11/14/06, 11/17/06

Grombowicz (author)
2/10/05, 2/11/05

Guelzo (author)
5/20/04, 6/3/04, 12/9/04, 4/22/05

Hackworth (military analyst)
5/23/05

Hagerman (author)
11/7/05

Hagmaier (blogger)
5/24/05, 5/27/05, 6/1/05, 6/9/05, 7/20/05, 2/9/06, 2/10/06,

Halleck (general: see also “Marszalek”)
11/30/04, 6/1/05, 6/2/05, 6/3/05, 6/6/05, 6/16/05

Handlin (historian)
1/23/06

Hanson (author)
4/28/04

Hardeee (general)
8/30/06

Harsh (author)
4/15/05, 5/2/05, 6/28/06, 10/31/06

Hartwig (historian)
8/26/04

Hats (military)
12/11/05, 12/14/05

Hattaway (author)
3/15/04, 4/22/04, 2/22/05, 8/9/06, 12/4/06

Heintzelman (general)
8/12/06, 9/15/06

Helmets (McClellan)
3/9/05

Helmets (McDowell, see also helmet series)
9/11/06

Hennessy (historian)
6/30/04, 3/28/05, 7/8/05, 9/13/06

Heritage tourism
10/24/03, 10/29/03, 10/30/03, 11/05, 11/19/03, 12/12/03, 1/28/04, 1/30/04, 2/3/04, 3/16/04, 3/19/04, 3/21/04, 3/30/04, 4/9/04, 4/29/04, 7/1/04, 8/20/04, 10/18/04, 2/25/05, 3/8/05, 3/10/05, 4/20/05, 5/16/05, 5/18/05, 9/22/05, 12/1/05, 6/21/06, 7/16/06, 7/18/06, 8/4/06, 8/8/06, 8/16/06, 10/4/06, 12/6/06, 12/11/06, 12/22/06

Hicks (author)
8/29/05, 8/30/05

Hindemith (composer)
4/29/04

Historical markers
9/11/03

Historical time
2/19/04, 10/11/06

History (curriculum)
12/9/03, 1/26/04, 3/26/04, 4/14/04, 5/14/04, 10/15/04, 3/15/05, 5/18/05, 6/8/05, 5/16/06, 12/1/06

History (ethics)
10/3/2003, 3/10/05, 3/11/05, 3/17/05

History and evidence
10/21/03, 6/14/04, 6/15/04, 1/27/05

History via punditry
9/8/2003, 8/18/05, 8/23/05, 8/24/05, 7/17/06, 12/27/06

Hobsbawm (author)
6/5/06, 6/6/06

Hoffer (author)
9/20/04, 10/25/04, 11/15/04, 11/19/04, 12/30/04, 2/1/05, 5/3/05

Hood (general)
11/17/04, 5/31/06, 10/17/06

Howard (general)
5/26/06, 5/27/06

Hyperreality
See Baudrillard

Ingram (wholesaler)
12/10/04, 8/18/05,

“Iron Brigade”
1/22/04

Ironclads
11/4/03, 3/22/05, 3/24/05, 5/3/05, 6/8/05

Jack (ACW ripper)
7/26/04

Jaffa (author)
2/16/04, 5/20/05

James (thief)
9/13/04

Johnson (president)
12/28/04

Johnston J (general, see also “Cavalry Doctrine”)
8/28/06, 8/30/06, 10/8/06, 10/31/06

Jomini vs. Clausewitz
3/29/04, 12/2/05, 12/6/05

Jones (author)
11/5/04, 2/22/05, 4/15/05, 8/9/06, 11/03/06

Juneteenth
1/2/04, 6/22/04

Kearny (general, see also Styple)
10/17/06, 11/9/06

Keegan (author)
11/28/03

Kelly (sculptor)
See Styple

Keyes (general)
8/18/06

Keyes (politician)
8/23/04

Koepke (blogger)
9/9/05

Korda (author)
11/24/04, 7/15/05, 8/22/05, 4/18/06

Lander (general)
1/5/05

Larabee (author)
8/18/05, 9/22/05, 1/5/06

Lasker (chess master)
5/18/06

Last Full Measure (movie)
7/30/04, 10/6/04, 7/24/06

Last Samurai (movie)
11/10/03, 12/5/03

Law and Supreme Court
10/27/03, 11/3/03, 2/17/04

Le Carre (author)
12/21/05

Lee (general)
5/12/04, 8/2/04, 9/22/04, 11/9/04, 10/14/05, 1/20/06, 10/31/06

Leech (author)
2/4/05, 3/14/05

Lehrman (philanthropist)
8/24/04

Levin (blogger)
11/30/05, 1/16/06, 2/8/06, 4/3/06, 4/4/06, 10/31/06

Limbaugh (radio host – see also “Clark”)
8/24/05

Lincoln (advertising)
1/28/04, 2/22/05, 9/12/06, 9/15/06

Lincoln (assassination)
8/24/04, 12/9/04, 4/5/05, 9/21/05, 1/3/05

Lincoln (corpse)
11/6/03

Lincoln and Declaration (see also “Keyes, politician” and “Constitution”)
8/23/04, 8/24/04

Lincoln (gay)
9/18/03, 12/23/04, 1/18/05, 2/16/05

Lincoln impersonators
1/28/04, 3/23/04

Lincoln Institute
8/24/04

Lincoln (legends)
5/3/05, 10/22/06

Lincoln as Maguffin
1/31/05, 2/7/05, 3/3/05

“Lincoln/McClellan Syndrome”
6/17/05

Lincoln (opponents)
10/13/04, 3/2/05

Lincoln (property, see also series “Social Identity”)
2/14/05

Lincoln (psychology)
9/22/05, 3/27/06, 5/5/06

Lincoln Prize (see also “Borrit”)
2/13/04, 2/13/06, 2/27/06

Lincoln voice recordings/speeches
7/12/04, 7/21/08, 1/12/05

Lincoln (war powers)
7/23/06

Lind (military analyst)
10/1/04, 5/6/05, 7/8/05

Livermore (historian)
See “Numbers and Losses”

Local historians
11/13/03, 11/27/03, 3/31/04, 8/2/06

Longstreet (general)
8/7/06

Loring (general)
9/20/05

Lost Order
7/23/04, 9/22/04, 9/25/04

Lost Cause (see also “Lost Cause” series)
6/5/06, 6/6/06, 6/11/06

Lowry (author)
10/27/03, 2/17/04, 1/25/06

Lukacs (author)
4/16/04

Luker (historian)
8/4/05, 10/5/05

Mandelbrot (mathematician)
3/23/05, 4/15/05

Marquand (author)
8/1/06

Marvel (author)
4/28/04, 9/4/06, 11/14/06, 11/17/06

Marszalek (author)
11/30/04, 6/1/05, 6/2/05, 6/16/05

Marx and Engels (revolutionaries)
10/28/03, 6/3/04

Maxwell (filmmaker)
6/9/04, 7/30/04, 10/6/04, 1/20/06, 2/8/06, 3/22/06, 7/24/06, 8/22/06

McClellan, Dr. G
1/2/06

McClellan (lost telegram date)
2/26/04

McClellan and Jackson
5/5/04, 5/10/04

McClellan, Max
1/2/06

McClellan poetry
3/13/04, 3/20/04, 3/27/04, 4/3/04, 4/4/04, 4/10/04, 4/17/04, 4/24/04, 5/1/04, 5/8/04, 5/15/04, 5/22/04, 5/29/04, 6/5/04, 6/12/04, 6/17/04, 6/20/04, 6/26/04, 7/3/04, 7/10/04, 7/17/04, 7/24/04, 7/31/04, 8/8/04, 8/15/04, 8/21/04, 8/28/04, 9/4/04, 9/11/04, 9/18/04, 10/2/04, 10/16/04

“McClellan Rangers”
8/3/05, 8/4/05, 8/8/05

McClellan replacements (notional)
10/13/05, 10/31/05,

McLuhan (media analyst)
1/17/06, 4/4/06

McCullough (author)
9/12/05

McDonald (author)
12/6/04

McDowell (general, see also “Helmets” series)
12/12/05, 12/15/05, 8/9/06, 9/11/06, 9/12/06, 9/13/06, 9/17/06

McDowell (colonel)
9/12/06, 9/13/06

McDowell (paymaster)
See “Cotton Trading”

McFeely (author)
2/23/04, 2/24/04, 8/22/05, 9/12/05

McMurry (author)
5/24/04

McPherson (author)
12/13/04, 12/15/04, 2/23/05, 3/28/05, 5/3/05, 8/29/05, 9/16/05, 10/24/05, 11/2/05, 4/27/06, 6/23/06, 7/4/06, 11/7/06, 12/22/06

McPherson (illustrated Battle Cry)
9/11/03, 11/14/03

McPherson (celebrity)
1/12/2004, 2/9/04, 2/11/04, 2/12/04, 3/15/04, 4/8/04, 4/28/04, 5/21/04, 9/20/04, 10/5/04, 11/11/04, 12/2/04, 12/3/04, 2/15/05, 5/6/05, 6/14/05, 8/1/05, 8/3/05, 8/5/05, 8/8/05, 8/19/05, 8/25/05, 9/15/05, 9/22/05, 10/5/05, 11/22/05, 12/2/05, 12/7/05

Meade (general)
5/31/06

Meigs (general)
6/30/06, 9/13/06

Medicine (ACW)
8/12/05, 11/28/05, 4/24/06

Mexican War vets
2/19/04

Military history
8/11/04, 1/13/05, 9/20/06, 10/12/06, 10/22/06

Military reform (see also Boyd, also series)
6/28/04, 5/6/05, 7/8/05, 9/14/05, 11/28/05, 2/9/06, 6/23/06

Military science
11/3/03, 1/20/04, 7/2/04, 10/1/04, 10/26/04, 11/5/04

Miller R (author)
8/24/04, 8/26/05, 10/20/05, 10/25/05, 12/10/05, 2/24/06, 4/4/06

Von Moeltke (general)
4/26/06

Montgomery (author)
1/3/06

Morningside books
9/17/03, 1/15/06

Morphy (chess master, see also “Scott”)
7/2/4, 9/16/04

Morton (governor)
11/24/03

Mosier (author)
12/13/04, 1/26/05

Moten (author – see “Cavalry Doctrine” series)
9/7/06

Mozart
9/3/04

Mummers
1/2/04, 1/1/05

Music of the ACW
2/20/04, 4/13/04, 4/14/04, 4/18/04, 4/26/04, 5/24/04, 5/25/04, 7/23/04, 9/3/04, 11/16/04, 3/7/05, 3/8/05, 11/1/05, 7/16/06

Muslims and the ACW
9/8/04, 9/14/04

NPS
8/29/03, 9/9/03, 9/19/03, 9/29/03, 10/7/03, 10/22/03, 12/4/03, 1/21/04, 3/10/04, 6/29/04, 2/4/05, 5/26/05, 7/1/05, 7/20/05, 9/7/05

Naglee (general)
10/22/04

Navies of the ACW
10/20/03, 11/4/03, 12/2/03, 3/8/04, 3/29/04, 3/22/05, 3/24/05, 5/3/05, 6/8/05, 8/5/05, 5/12/06, 7/30/06

Neely (author)
11/29/05, 1/25/06, 5/18/06, 6/20/06, 6/26/06, 6/28/06

Nevins (plagiarism)
12/23/03

Nevins (author, see also “Centennialism” and “American Heritage”)
1/16/04, 11/11/04, 11/24/04, 12/13/04, 1/23/06, 6/23/06, 7/4/06

New paradigms
10/15/03, 3/28/05, 4/7/05

Newton (author)
3/28/05

Nolan (author)
1/22/04, 6/11/06

Nosworthy (author)
3/4/05, 3/23/05, 3/24/05, 3/28/05, 4/7/05, 4/15/05, 2/9/06,

Nous
4/25/06

Numbers and losses (see also series “Numerolgy”)
11/17/03, 9/7/04, 10/27/04, 10/29/04, 11/3/04, 1/3/05, 6/7/05, 6/28/05, 6/26/06, 10/1/06, 10/3/06, 10/5/06, 10/8/06, 10/9/06, 10/23/06, 10/25/06, 10/26/06, 10/30/06, 10/31/06

OAH
8/4/05

Olcott (ACW Buddhist)
8/2/05

Olmsted (landscaper)
9/13/05

POW
6/10/04

Painting the ACW
10/13/03, 10/24/03, 7/1/04, 8/16/04, 10/19/04, 11/9/04, 6/2/05, 6/17/05, 4/17/06

“Parasocial relationships”
7/29/05,

Patterson (general)
10/29/04, 11/12/04, 9/7/05

Perrett (author)
3/22/05, 4/26/05

Perry (author)
8/22/05

Pershing (general)
6/28/04, 11/10/06

Phillips (author)
6/24/05, 7/25/05

Pinkerton (detective; see also “Numerology” series)
10/16/03, 8/23/06

Plagiarism
9/14/04, 9/27/04, 9/28/04, 10/1/04, 10/4/04, 10/8/04, 1/6/05, 2/8/05, 3/10/05, 4/27/05, 4/29/05, 5/2/05, 5/3/05, 5/5/05, 5/9/05, 5/13/05, 7/21/05, 8/4/05, 10/5/05, 11/18/05, 9/15/06, 9/22/06, 11/14/06, 11/15/06, 12/7/06, 12/8/06

Pleasanton (general)
11/21/06, 11/22/06

Pohanka (author)
10/30/03, 6/20/05, 8/4/05, 9/30/05, 3/14/06,

Polk (president)
9/15/04, 1/3/06

Political generals (see also “Goss”)
5/11/04, 5/13/04

Pop history
11/23/04, 5/10/05, 5/19/05, 5/20/05, 5/31/05, 6/21/05, 8/1/05, 9/15/05, 11/7/05, 12/21/05, 1/3/06, 6/23/06, 12/28/06

Pop history (master narrative)
8/27/03, 9/3/03, 9/4/03, 4/29/04, 8/4/04, 9/22/04, 5/11/05, 6/25/05, 7/7/05, 9/27/06, 12/27/06

Popper (philosopher)
1/12/06, 6/5/06, 6/6/06

Porter (general)
11/21/06

Poulter (editor)
5/13/05, 10/3/05

Preservation
3/24/04, 3/25/04, 4/2/04, 4/5/04, 4/12/04, 4/22/04, 5/6/04, 7/9/04, 7/15/04, 8/3/04, 8/12/04, 8/25/05, 8/30/04, 8/31/04, 9/1/04, 9/2/04, 9/3/04, 9/7/04, 9/9/04, 9/10/04, 9/13/04, 9/15/04, 9/16/04, 9/17/04, 9/20/04, 10/4/04, 10/8/04, 10/20/04, 10/21/04, 10/22/04, 10/24/04, 10/25/04, 11/01/04, 11/02/04, 11/3/04, 11/10/04, 11/22/04, 12/2/04, 12/20/04, 1/5/05, 1/21/05, 1/27/05, 1/28/05, 2/9/05, 2/16/05, 2/18/05, 2/23/05, 2/28/05, 4/1/05, 4/25/05, 5/17/05, 6/27/05, 7/6/05, 7/25/05, 7/27/05, 8/2/05, 8/3/06, 9/7/05, 9/8/05, 11/29/05, 12/1/05, 3/1/06, 3/7/06, 3/8/06, 5/23/06, 5/24/06, 6/22/06, 12/26/06

Priest (author)
3/28/05

Prokopowicz (radio host)
5/13/05, 6/22/05, 7/14/05, 10/3/05, 10/17/05, 10/21/05, 1/25/06, 7/4/06

“Public history”
12/5/03, 12/19/03, 6/30/04, 7/9/04, 8/16/04, 11/18/04, 12/8/04, 12/10/04, 12/23/04, 1/13/05, 2/1/05, 2/7/05, 2/9/05, 3/2/05, 3/14/05, 3/18/05, 3/21/05, 4/6/05, 5/11/05, 5/13/05, 5/25/05, 6/8/05, 6/13/05, 6/21/05, 11/29/05, 7/30/06

Publishing (foibles)
2/2/04, 8/16/04, 9/8/04, 11/16/04, 1/25/05, 5/19/05, 5/23/05, 5/31/05, 10/12/05, 11/6/05, 1/12/06, 1/13/06, 9/3/06

Publishing (tech)
6/25/04, 1/25/05, 3/22/05, 5/4/05, 3/15/06, 4/4/06, 4/5/06, 6/1/06, 6/5/06, 6/18/06, 7/17/06, 9/11/06, 9/22/06

Publishing (trends, see also series on sales figures)
11/26/04, 12/7/04, 12/8/04, 12/9/04, 12/10/04, 12/13/04, 12/21/04, 12/23/04, 12/24/04, 12/28/04, 12/29/04, 12/30/04, 12/31/04, 5/4/05, 5/9/05, 5/17/05, 9/6/06, 11/13/06

Rafuse (author, see also “Command Crisis” series)
5/11/05, 5/12/05, 5/27/05, 6/9/05, 6/13/05, 7/11/05, 7/20/05, 10/18/05, 1/30/06, 5/31/06, 8/24/06, 9/19/06, 11/03/06

Railroads
4/14/05, 5/4/05

Randall (author)
9/16/05, 12/7/05, 4/3/06

Ransom (alternative history)
8/16/05, 8/18/05

Rawley (author)
12/7/05

Ray (author)
1/23/06

Reagan (president)
6/7/04, 6/11/04,

Reality TV, ACW
1/1/04, 11/6/06

Reconstruction
8/26/05

Reed (author)
1/14/05

Reenacting
5/4/04, 6/18/04, 8/17/04, 9/28/04, 5/10/05, 10/3/05, 7/19/06, 8/22/06

Reenacting (opposition to)
11/20/03, 4/21/04, 1/19/05

Reenactors, drunken
10/3/06, 11/24/03, 5/19/04

Reese (author; see also High-Water Mark series)
9/1/03, 10/6/03, 1/14/04, 1/22/04, 2/26/04, 3/31/04, 4/22/04, 4/30/04, 5/21/04, 6/16/04, 6/22/04, 7/8/04, 7/30/04, 8/25/05, 1/11/05 , 1/20/05, 2/16/05, 3/8/05, 5/13/05, 5/24/05, 5/27/05, 6/13/05, 9/22/05, 12/15/05, 12/16/05, 1/9/06, 1/13/06, 1/18/06, 3/1/06, 4/4/06, 6/5/06, 6/18/06, 9/11/06, 9/12/06, 9/13/06,

Republicans
10/24/03, 11/24/03, 3/24/04, 4/27/04, 1/24/06, 3/13/06, 11/1/06

Research failures
10/8/03, 10/17/03, 11/28/03, 12/19/03, 12/30/03, 12/31/03, 1/5/04, 1/9/04, 1/14/04, 2/26/04, 5/25/04, 11/17/04

Research (failures, McPherson)
11/28/03

Research (failures, Sears)
1/5/03, 1/6/04, 1/7/04, 1/8/04, 1/11/04

Ride with the Devil (movie)
7/30/04

Ridgway (author)
8/24/05

Robb (military analyst)
6/6/05, 7/22/05, 11/10/06

Robertson (author)
1/4/06

Ropes (author)
6/30/04

Roundtables
10/7/04

Rowland (author)
4/7/05, 4/12/05, 4/13/05, 4/15/05, 5/27/05, 7/5/05, 9/11/06

Ruhlman (author)
9/4/06, 11/14/06, 11/15/06, 11/17/06

Rumsfeld (secdef)
5/13/04

Savas (publisher, incl. Savas Beatie)
9/22/04, 1/28/05, 4/6/05, 8/4/05, 3/1/06, 4/14/06, 4/17/06, 5/17/06, 6/7/06, 11/3/06, 11/19/06

Schofield (see also “Connelly”)
10/17/06, 11/03/06

Schulte (blogger)
9/6/05, 9/9/05, 9/19/05, 9/28/05, 10/18/05, 1/6/05, 4/18/06

Schwartz (historian)
5/13/05, 11/25/06

Sci-fi ACW
11/23/05

Scott (general)
4/23/04, 9/16/04, 1/19/05

Sears (author)
7/23/04, 9/22/04, 9/25/04, 12/20/04, 3/4/05, 3/28/05, 8/9/05, 8/19/05, 8/29/05, 9/12/05, 3/16/06

Sears (Gettysburg)
12/10/03, 2/11/04

Sears (Civil War Papers of GBM)
1/7/04, 1/8/04, 1/9/04, 1/11/04, 4/4/06,

Shaara, J (author)
2/9/04, 4/29/04, 12/22/04, 8/10/05, 9/12/05, 9/25/06

Shackel (author)
11/21/03, 11/25/03, 11/27/03

Shepherdstown (battle)
7/27/05, 7/29/05, 9/9/05, 1/20/06, 3/14/06

Sheridan (general, see also “Little Phil” series)
2/4/04, 5/24/04, 5/25/04, 6/6/05, 9/26/05

Sherlock (author)
9/22/04, 3/16/06

Sherman T (general)
8/02/04

Sherman W (brother of senator)
3/14/05, 3/17/05, 1/2/06, 10/17/06

Silman (chess master)
7/2/04, 5/18/06

Simon (author)
2/16/04, 2/20/04, 2/23/04, 4/14/04, 6/15/04, 12/1/04, 3/28/05, 6/23/05, 7/14/05, 9/15/05,

Simpson (author)
2/23/04, 11/22/04, 11/29/04, 3/22/05, 3/28/05, 5/12/05, 9/16/05, 3/21/06, 10/22/06, 12/19/06

Slavery
2/5/04, 7/26/04, 10/08/04, 3/2/05, 6/9/06, 7/20/06

Slavery (reparations)
12/9/03, 12/23/03, 4/20/04, 8/23/04, 10/04/05

Smeltzer (blogger, about)
11/17/05, 5/16/06, 5/24/06, 6/2/06, 9/13/06, 11/6/06, 11/13/06, 12/8/06

Smeltzer (blogged by)
5/25/06, 5/26/06, 5/27/06, 5/29/06, 5/30/06, 5/31/06, 6/1/06

Smith W (general)
11/8/04, 11/10/04

Smith, J (author)
2/23/04, 4/27/05, 4/29/05, 5/2/05, 5/3/05, 5/5/05, 8/22/05

Smith T (author)
6/28/05

Smithsonian
4/21/06

Snell (author)
1/5/04, 1/6/04, 4/15/04, 4/22/04, 8/30/04, 5/11/05, 6/22/05, 6/30/06

Sprague (governor, see also “Cotton Trading,” and “Burnside”)
9/12/06

Springfield (IL)
8/6/04, 10/11/04, 2/7/05, 1/16/06

Stanton (secwar)
6/2/04, 6/8/04, 2/4/05

“Stevens Floating Battery”
3/4/05, 12/7/06

Stotelmyer (lecturer)
8/25/04, 8/26/04, 1/6/05, 2/14/05, 2/15/05, 2/16/05

Strain (painter)
8/16/04, 4/19/05

Strategy (see also military reform)
5/6/05, 6/24/05, 4/26/06

Striner (author)
11/29/06

Styple (author)
2/3/06, 4/13/06, 10/17/06, 11/21/06, 11/22/06, 12/5/06

Sumner (general)
8/24/06, 8/28/06, 8/30/06

Sumner (senator)
1/3/06

Sumner and Sumner
1/4/06, 8/28/06

Sun Tzu (theoretician)
10/1/04

Surgeons’ headcounts (see also series “Numerology” and “Numbers and Losses”)
6/7/05

Sweeny (general)
7/21/04

Symonds (author)
7/30/06

Taaffe (author – see also series on Corps Commanders)
5/18/06, 8/9/06, 8/10/06, 8/12/06, 8/18/06, 8/24/06, 9/17/06, 10/12/06

Taleb (contingency theorist)
4/14/05, 4/15/05, 1/23/06,

Taney (chief justice)
12/31/03

Tidball (general)
9/13/06

Timrod (poet)
7/19/05

Todman (blogger)
8/23/05

Trading cards, ACW
7/12/04

Trefousse (author)
11/28/05, 11/29/05, 12/7/05, 11/29/06

Tsouras (editor)
5/24/04, 5/25/04, 5/26/04, 5/27/04, 5/28/04, 6/1/04, 6/2/04, 6/3/04, 6/4/04, 6/6/05, 6/8/04

Tubman biographies
1/27/04

Turchin (general)
4/11/05, 9/7/06

USV (institution)
9/23/05

Updike (author)
5/5/05

Upton (general)
7/14/05

Valee (ufologist)
6/11/06

Vandalism
11/7/03, 11/24/03, 12/2/03, 1/21/04, 10/12/04, 11/15/04, 2/17/05, 5/27/05, 6/20/05, 7/5/05, 8/25/05, 10/10/05, 1/9/06, 5/1/06

Vandergriff (military analyst)
5/23/05

Veterans (fake)
11/18/03, 4/28/04

Vidal (author)
12/21/04, 3/3/05, 9/12/05

Voegelin (philosopher)
4/14/04, 12/16/05, 4/25/06, 6/11/06

WWI
11/11/03, 11/11/04, 12/22/04, 2/4/05, 2/8/05, 11/11/05, 6/29/06, 11/10/06

Wade (senator)
11/22/06, 11/27/06

Wagenhoffer (game designer)
6/3/05, 6/7/05, 9/6/05, 9/7/05, 9/9/05, 9/19/05, 11/7/05, 5/22/06, 8/7/06

Waud (illustrator)
11/19/06

Waugh (author)
4/14/04

Washburn(e)s (any, all)
3/1/05

Weigley (author)
3/15/04, 4/1/04

Western theatre
6/15/06, 6/19/06, 7/12/06, 11/30/06

Whigs
3/25/05, 5/12/05

Whig theory of history
9/26/05

Willards (hotel)
7/28/04, 8/18/04, 12/15/04, 10/20/05, 10/21/05,

Williams F (author)
5/13/05

Williams K (author)
12/13/04

Williams T (author)
12/10/04, 11/29/05, 3/16/06

Williamsburg (battle)
8/3/04, 1/21/05, 11/3/06, 12/19/06

Wilson (author)
7/19/05, 7/24/06, 7/31/06

Winik (author)
2/22/05, 4/6/05, 5/6/05, 8/8/05, 8/18/05, 4/26/06, 7/6/06, 11/10/06

Wirz (commandant)
9/4/06

Wittenberg (author – see also Little Phil series)
6/6/05, 6/22/05, 9/6/05, 9/26/05, 10/3/05, 10/14/05, 11/6/05, 11/18/05, 11/29/05, 1/4/06, 1/15/06, 3/1/06, 3/14/06, 4/5/06, 4/14/06, 6/7/06, 8/10/06, 10/17/06

“Who are you?”
3/26/04

Woodbury (blogger)
12/10/05, 1/20/06, 2/8/06, 4/14/06, 5/22/06

Woodward (author)
9/16/05, 11/2/05

Woodworth (author)
5/4/4, 3/21/06, 5/31/06

Wrangel (general)
10/04/05

Yates
11/24/03


SERIES LISTING
(Chronological order)

The State of Civil War History
9/22/03, 9/23/03, 9/24/03, 9/25/03, 9/26/03

Military Reform Now and Then
5/13/04, 5/14/04, 5/16/04, 5/17/04, 5/18/04, 5/19/04, 5/20/04, 5/21/04, 5/28/04

High-Water Mark
7/14/04, 7/16/04, 7/20/04, 7/22/04, 7/27/04, 7/29/04, 8/3/04, 8/5/04, 8/10/04, 8/12/04, 8/19/04, 8/20/04

Fallacies of Abundance
9/23/04, 9/25/04

No Strategies Please, We’re Politicians
9/30/04, 10/1/04,

ACW Hyperreality
10/14/04, 10/15/04, 10/18/04, 10/19/04

Book Sales and New Thinking
12/08/04, 12/09/04, 12/10/04, 12/13/04, 12/14/04, 12/15/04, 12/20/04, 12/21/04, 12/24/04

The Quality of Historical Speculation
4/14/05, 4/15/05

Jean Smith and Grant
4/27/05, 4/29/05, 5/2/05, 5/3/05, 5/5/05

Our Civil War Army in Iraq (theme, not series)
5/6/05, 5/23/05 (Hackworth), 6/6/05, 7/8/05, 8/25/05, 9/14/05

McClellan at Gettysburg
5/24/05, 5/25/05, 5/26/05, 5/27/05, 6/1/05

Marszalek and Halleck
6/1/05, 6/2/05, 6/16/05; 6/3/05 and 6/6/05 Halleck sans Marszalek

McClellan’s War by Rafuse
6/9/05, 6/13/05, 7/20/05

Appreciating Foote (theme, not series)
6/29/05, 6/30/05, 7/5/05, 8/16/05

ACW sea novels (theme, not series)
7/6/05, 7/28/05, 8/12/05, 9/13/05

Book sales 2005
8/4/05, 8/5/05, 8/8/05, 8/9/05, 8/10/05, 8/22/05

Whig Theory of ACW History
9/26/05, 9/27/05

Wittenberg’s Little Phil
10/17/05, 10/18/05, 10/19/05

Lost Continents of Understanding
10/24/05 (to be cont.)

“Dialogs”
McLuhan, 1/17/06; Baudrillard, 1/18/06; Ortega, 1/24/06; Zizek, 2/9/06; McLaren, 3/30/06

The Command Crisis of 9/62
1/30/06, 2/1/06, 2/3/06, 2/4/06,

Book Sales in 2005
4/11/06, 4/18/06, 4/27/06,

Twenty Questions for CWPT
3/20/06, 3/21/06, 3/22/06, 3/23/06

Failing Better
4/4/06, 4/5/06

Howard’s Torpedo (by Harry Smeltzer)
5/26/06, 5/27/06

Burning of Darien (by Harry Smeltzer)
5/29/06, 5/30/06

Lost Cause Historiography
6/5/06, 6/6/06, 6/11/06

How to become a Corps Commander
8/10/06, 8/12/06, 8/18/06, 8/23/06, 8/24/06, 9/11/06, 9/17/06

McClellan/Johnston Cavalry Doctrines
8/28/06, 8/30/06, 9/7/06,

McDowell’s “Obnoxious” Hat
9/12/06, 9/13/06

Historians as Numerolgists
10/2/06, 10/3/06, 10/5/06, 10/8/06, 10/9/06, 10/23/06, 10/26/06, 10/31/06

Conditions for Commanding the AOP
11/19/06, 11/21/06, 11/22/06, 11/27/06

Lincoln’s Social Identity
12/12/06, 12/16/06, 12/18/06