No strategies please, we're politicians

The irritation of this political blogger reminds me of my reaction to Lincoln in the Civil War:

I continue to find myself frustrated by lack of understanding of the reach of the War on Terror. I have yet to hear any offical explain the stragety of the war, and unfortunately the Administration has been reluctant to lay it out as they are afraid of being labeled "War Mongers".

He runs off the rails with "War Mongers," but this pretty well captures how I felt first reading through the cycle "General X submits plan" + "Lincoln fails to comment on plan." I'm not talking about battle plans or campaign plans, I'm talking war-winning strategy.

However, it's not entirely a Lincoln thing. Any administration has ample disincentive to "lay it out." Aside from "security" matters, we can count the inhibitors by analyzing the Civil War experience:

* You don't want the public measuring and judging your progress.

* You don't want commit in advance to a multi-election-cycle plan.

* You don't want to relinquish the freedom to make a large number of ad hoc decisions.

* You don't want people analyzing inevitable political tampering with what they perceive as a purely military plan.

* You don't want your political opponents proposing a concrete and better overall plan.

* You don't want your generals managing you by holding results hostage to men, supplies, etc.

* You don't want anything that smacks of timetable - not in any form, direct or implied, ever.

Those are seven unlucky breaks for national strategists.

Lincoln's aversion to strategy was a function of his political sense.

Handheld scanners

I've been agonizing for sometime about getting a device that will let me capture both text and images in archival (controlled) situations. I don't want to lug a laptop around and obviously cannot feed ancient manuscript pages into a sheet scanner; neither can I use a tiny beam/flashlight type scanner favored by my brother-in-law to go through rare books line by line.

This seems to be the answer and it seems to have no counterpart in the market. Have a look.

September books

The list below closes out what I know about September books. Let me place at the head of the list, Bugle Resounding: Music And Musicians Of The Civil War Era by Bruce Kelley and Mark Snell.

For comic relief, there's Civil War Fantastic by Martin Harry Greenberg (editor), a collection of short stories about the Civil War by writers of science fiction.

SEPTEMBER BOOKS | These books have been or will be published in September: John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War by Franny Nudelman * Lincoln on Democracy by Mario M. Cuomo, Harold Holzer * Loyalty and Loss: Alabama's Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Margaret M. Storey, T. Michael Parrish * Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction by James Alex Alex Baggett * The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas by Sidney Andrews * The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement Richard M. Valelly * Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero by Michael Korda * Zeb Vance: North Carolina's Civil War Governor and Gilded Age Political Leader by Gordon McKinney * The Other Gettysburg by Creighton * I Hope to Do My Country Service: The Civil War Letters of John Bennitt, M.D., Surgeon in the 19th Michigan Infantry * Affectionately Yours * Confederate Submarines and Torpedo Vessels 1861-65 by Angus Konstam * American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 by Sally Denton * Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from 1790s through the Civil War by Melvin Patrick Ely * Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872
by Lou Falkner Williams * The Reconstruction of Southern Debtors: Bankruptcy after the Civil War by Elizabeth Lee Thompson * Civil War and Reconstruction by William E. Gienapp * The Confederate Dirty War by Jane Singer

A new opera featuring Ulysses Grant?

Count me in. See you there, January 28th.

A roundtable fairytale come true

"The 40 amateur historians who made up the Bucks County Civil War Round Table knew as much about charter member Frederick W. Holzwarth Jr. as they knew about each other. He was a fan of Abraham Lincoln and a font of battlefield knowledge from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. But who among them wasn't?"

"What they didn't know was that the quiet bachelor from Richboro was wealthy, generous, and devoted to his beloved group."

"When Holzwarth died in April 2002 at age 73, members were shocked to learn that he had left the round table nearly $1.6 million - and a list of instructions on how to use it."

Quite a story: registration may be required.

Private park teaches heritage toursim

The privately funded National Museum of the Civil War Soldier near Petersburg seems to have wowed a group of visiting Spotsylvania County officials. Have a look:

What supervisors saw there impressed them and opened their eyes to the direction of historic tourism. "The era of being able to attract people by having an empty field is over," said board chairman Robert Hagan.

(Hagan pushed for the recent Tricord deal at Chancellorsville. The deal will feature an empty field.)

NEWS | History dept. seeks McPherson replacement * Group says lack of money threatens Saint-Gaudens site * CSA supply ship featured in TV show * Tennessee colonel's home damaged by fire

Historic VR tours - long overdue?

One cannot believe that this idea is just now breaking out:

E-motion, a Springfield-based Web design company, recently launched www.springfield-vr.com, which features "virtual-reality" tours of the Lincoln sites and other local tourist hot spots.

It's like something from 10 years ago:

The site has VR tours for nine tourist sites, including the two state capitol buildings; the Lincoln home, tomb, depot and law office; the Dana-Thomas House; Vachel Lindsay Home and New Salem.

You can get your own favorite battlefield on line for the price of a pair of football tickets:

For $300, Edwards' company will shoot and post a single 360-degree photograph. It'll cost another $300 for each additional VR of another room or area.

See the article here.

As thick as academic thieves

TV celebrity Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard Law professor whose plagiarism was exposed on Saturday, has been defended by his Harvard colleague Charles J. Ogletree, a man also bedeviled by plagiarism charges. Ogletree called the discovery of Tribe's plagiarism "nonsense."

Embarassingly for Ogletree, Tribe has admitted wrongdoing today and apologized, by letter, to his victim.

Commenting on Tribe's admission, another Harvard Law professor and plagiarist, Alan Dershowitz, said "I think Larry may be overreacting."

Caught red-handed, with stolen passages published in a national magazine, Tribe's admission and apology "may be overreacting" to someone teaching law at Harvard; may be "nonsense" to others. Very pretty. And there's a pattern:

Last fall, Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz also battled plagiarism charges. And in 2002, Harvard Overseer Doris Kearns Goodwin admitted that she had accidently copied passages from another scholar in her bestseller The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

Tribe, who was named one of Harvard’s 19 University Professors last June, defended [historian] Goodwin against plagiarism charges two years ago on the grounds that her work was “closely documented with something like 3,500 footnotes.”

By the way, whatever has happened to Goodwin's planned book on Lincoln? That famously honest president?

Tip of the hat to the Crimson.

Franklin re-enactment re-located

This is a strange development, considering the planning that has gone into the event.

Because there's not enough room in Franklin or Nashville, the re-enactors are staging their exhibitions a few miles south on a farm in Spring Hill.

NEWS | Maryland crewman identified from submarine * Plumb monument unveiled * Tower rises on South Mountain

Pesky grad students get another prof in trouble

I was at a party a few years ago with some Chicago advertising people and was introduced to a young woman who, I was told, had developed the "Got Milk" campaign. I was impressed for about a year until I encountered more authors of this campaign. Taking credit for "Got Milk" turns out to be an in-joke in the industry.

In the academy right now, we have the opposite phenomenon: people denying they wrote their own books.

The new standard plagiarism defense for professors authoring nonfiction is, "my grad students did it." The latest "victim" is the insufferable commentator/professor Lawrence Tribe and the newest manifestation of the problem is a full-time Harvard University plagiarism blog.

I mentioned a friend once asking a London grad school if professors would be appropriating his research; the answer came, "This is not the States, sir. We do our own research here." You can imagine how strongly, therefore, I disagree with law professor Glenn Reynolds when he says,

Getting together a bunch of research assistants and outsourcing a book to them, with the product of their work appearing under one's own name, isn't exactly immoral -- but it isn't scholarship, either.

For any person self-defined as a scholar, these are the most immoral acts I can imagine. This is a corruption so extreme as to completely negate the perpetrator's definition of life, work, and self.

Look at the sick-think being penned by this pathetic victim of the system, a Harvard student:

... he [Professor Ogletree] just got unlucky enough to have research assistants who accidentally messed up and screwed him over. This is bad for academia; it says bad things about the way people write books today.... I think [Dean] Velvel is right that Ogletree's assistants probably did a substantial deal more than assistants might do in a world with the highest standards of honesty and integrity. But I think Velvel's wrong to say that it means ... Ogletree wasn't competent and diligent without saying that it probably means everyone else isn't competent and diligent either, and Ogletree just got unlucky.

What was that, plain talking by a law student? Or the grotesque rationalizations of someone whose ethics have been damaged by the "norms" of Harvard research?

Plagiarism is a firing offense.

Plagiarists need public shaming.

Involuntary ghost writing is intellectual serfdom.

We knew we had a problem when McPherson's AHA colleagues publicly defended Doris Goodwin's "mistakes" and urged acceptance of her statement of non-apology. Now we have yet another PBS talking head - Tribe - scrutinized for plagiarism.

Would it not profit an editor or publisher to ask the author of a work to certify authorship of the work? If the plagiarism lawsuits would aim for the deeper pockets of the publisher, if the penalties and settlements imposed on publishers were stiff enough, we'd get a level of policing that purges nonfiction of both plagiarism and the secret labor of exploited grad students.

Monocacy documentary slated for release

The Battle of Monocacy documentary is a wrap and due out at Christmas.

"We try and get the human interest," Richards said. "We are covering the civilian situation at the time and the evacuation of Washington, D.C. They feared for their lives, it isn't strictly a war movie."

The company raised its half-a-million dollar budget by subscription and through private investors.

Calling all uniform specialists

If you are a Don Troiani-type ACW buff with a goodly reserve of uniform and accoutrements knowledge, here is a controversy you won't want to pass up.

Is the New Hampshire soldier in this monument dressed as a Rebel or as a Spanish-American War infantryman?

A couple of possibilities were missed by the controversialists: (1) a Union uniform with a slouch hat in lieu of kepi (2) An early-war regimental uniform.

What say ye?

NEWS | Re-enactment captures Shakers' Civil War compassion * Civil War-era diary printed * Lectures to address Civil War, Montpelier * Canadian city's Civil War ties to be honoured

Fallacies of abundance - conclusion

SATURDAY In lieu of the McClellan poetry feature normally posted on Saturdays, I thought I'd wrap up some thinking on Sears and the Lost Dispatch.
On Friday, I criticized Sears' argument that Lee did not know McClellan found the Lost Dispatch, Special Orders 191, based on my reading of Sears' Landscape Turned Red and Controversies and Commanders (he does not raise the subject in his McClellan biography.). I felt that no conclusion could be reached on this matter, that the meagre evidence was contradictory - that to reach a gratuitous conclusion and then build it into your narrative was a "fallacy of abundance."

After I made the point , a friend emailed "The Twisted Tale of the Lost Order" by Sears from North & South, Vol. 5, No. 7 (Oct., 2002), pages 54-65.

In Friday's postscript I misleadingly said that Sears had shifted his position in this article: actually, he has not. What he has done is present much more evidence on both sides of the question and try to deal with all the additional data presented so as to be able reach the same conclusion as previously.

This article puts him in the position of arguing away three explicit postwar statements by Lee that Stuart brought word that McClellan found the Lost Order. Overall, with the new information, his denial is somewhat less extravagant than before, but it is still superfluous and checkmated by contradictory sources.

I took some hours to outline the evidence referred to in Sears' three pieces, but it created an unbloglike list of dubious worth in amplifying this matter. Let me take the shortest section of my list, which is an outline of Sears' evidence and arguments listed in his essay in Controversies and Commanders. This is exhaustive in representing the views as set forth in that book:

(1) Sears says Lee received a (one?) report from Stuart that a civilian saw McClellan receive a paper, get excited, and say "Now I know what to do!" This was followed by HQ bustling. [Note: Harsh has identified two reports as received by Lee. There is no physical record remaining of these communiques.]

(2) Sears says Lee long after the fact mistakenly injected SO 191 into news of the civilian's report. He was a victim of hindsight and a bad memory. [This is Sears' surmise.]

(3) The spy himself, Sears says, could not have known McClellan received SO 191 because no Union soldier would tell such information to a civilian, particularly one from Maryland.

(4) Union discretion "evaporated" the next day, says Sears, when Union staff talked to the New York Herald, which then published news of the find in the morning edition of 9/15/62. [Sears allows for newspaper leaks but adamantly disallows the spy getting what the reporter got.]

(5) Lee did not see the news reports because he had "outrun" his Southen sources for Northern newspapers, Sears says. [Sears has not cited this surmise.]

(6) Lee's ADC, Marshall, says that Lee learned of the find from McClellan's report in March, '63. [We do not know which report Sears is referring to.]

This is the whole kit and kaboodle in an essay entitled "Last Words on the Lost Order" and I think it suffers from being published in hardback, where the publisher's editors have no ACW knowlege to ride down Sears' excesses and simplifications, nor to force him to confront all the data surrounding a controversy. To a trade publisher, Sears is the expert. The North & South article clearly benefits from placing Sears under knowledgeable supervision, and is therefore two or three times denser and richer that it would be had Sears been left to himself. (See his books on this topic if you disagree.)

So, Sears more reasonably argues his points from more sources. The question remains intractable, however. A little less so than in 1999, but to derive an opinion from this, convert that conclusion to "fact," and then to make that "fact" critical to your interpretation of events is still a fallacy.

Cherbourg - now on the ACW heritage trail

This is an interesting story:

The northern French port of Cherbourg on Thursday was declared the first official US Civil War site outside the United States, in honour of the spectacular naval battle off its shores in 1864.

Everybody wants our heritage tourists.

UPDATE: I'm currently topping four pages of outlined Sears positions and am becoming confused as to whether a clean point can be salvaged from this exercise. Will try to digest this and return to the subject tomorrow in lieu of Saturday's usual fare.

PREVIOUS POST: At about 5:00 pm. I'll take a tour of Sears' positions over the years ast to whether Lee knew of the discovery of his Lost Dispatch. Thanks for visiting.

SEPTEMBER BOOKS These books have been or will be published in September: Classic Civil War Stories: Unforgettable Tales about the War Between the States by Lisa Purcell * Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run 1861 by David Detzer * Fire on the Water: The USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama by James Gindlesperger * Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee's Maryland Campaign, September 1862 by James V. Murfin * Grand Old Man of Maine: Selected Letters of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1865-1914 by Jeremiah E. Goulka * Great Maps of the Civil War: Pivotal Battles and Campaigns Featuring 32 Removable Maps by William J. Miller * In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 by Edward L. Ayers * Some titles may represent reprints. To be continued...