Blog roundup

After Nov. 1, my routines changed and I have not been able to read and keep up with the expanding world of ACW blogging. I hope to get a new routine going soon. Even a cursory look around shows what I've been missing.

 

Andrew Wagenhoffer points out, per yesterday's post on Piedmont, that there is a "top notch" book on the battle, The Forgotten Fury . "The research is deep, grounded in published and unpublished primary source materials, and the reader is additionally treated to footnotes instead of endnotes." Speaking of forgotten battlefields that are despised by locals,   Tim Reese (not yet a blogger) commented to me that "Piedmont is the illegitimate twin brother of Crampton's Gap." We must pray, I think, that the Great and the Good eventually legitimize these places such that the locals can then begin profiting from them.

 

I wrote earlier that the Kelo eminent domain decision, if used to seize battlefield land, could make drive away private donors and depress membership in preservation organizations. Attorney Eric Wittenberg paints a more chilling picture: in Georgia, Kelo has been taken up to develop battlefield land. Let that sink in; the Kelo fiasco is about superior tax  revenue generation. (Mike Koepke has a little on this as well.)

 

On a lighter note, James McPherson's student Tom Carhart is taking some hard knocks from Civil War News (via Eric  and Drew):  "There's inadequate space in a book review to cite each factual error, contradiction and unsupported theory. Suffice to say, this reads more like a novel than historical analysis."Yikes.  I like this bit: "Meade — erroneously cited as George 'C.' Meade ..." Cees and Gees, leave that to those impenetrable academic scholars.

 

Kevin Levin has started a blog called Civil War Memory and has updated my preliminary year-in-publishing comments with an extensive rundown on some important 2005 titles. He wonders why I obsess on McPherson. Top reason - it's an enjoyable obsession to indulge, especially where the subject is vain, a little foolish, and his public adoring. Number two reason: lack of self control.  I'll indulge myself more on this topic at the end of the week.

 

Mitch Hagmaier has rekindled my interest in Kent Masterson Brown's Retreat from Gettysburg. His description of the book is wonderful - sounds like Lee's retreat was a page from the Thirty Years War. My inclination is to do a "Brown" on all Lee's movements - look into their details and savor the horror. It's on my list.

 

I can hardly believe, however, that Brown got himself entangled in a mistake as banal as the Clausewitzian/Jominian synchronization trap. Mitch covers those bases here and I would only repeat explicitly that Clausewitz was not published in America until some time after the ACW and his views were not in general (oral or literary) circulation here during the war. Not even the Prussian General Staff officer who wrote A Prussian Observes the Civil War makes mention of Clausewitz.

 

Mark Grimsley has a blog round-up of his own and it's less verbose than this one.

 

Don't miss Brett Schulte's multi-part writings on Harsh's Confederate Tide Rising. I need to do a ton of posting on Harsh but have been remiss. Brett's filling the gap to the tune of eight postings on just this one book. Go do some Harsh. Get Harsh. Be harsh.

 

I think I have discovered a credo.

 

 

History-laden Civil War latrines

His name is Spencer Henderson. He is Baltimore's most accomplished privy hunter.

As hobbies go, privy hunting is not pretty. It's not like, say, remodeling a '55 Chevy. It takes a different searching soul to dedicate months to digging 8 feet down into century-old outhouses in search of ... what?

See for yourself. It's magical.

Fort Pemberton - your private luxury community

This story makes me ill: "Easement, perhaps a few homes planned for Civil War era fort."

Just a few multimilliondollar homes here and there on or about a fort in great shape. An exclusive island with a unique history. And a socially-responsible easement to preserve it just the way it was the day the last home was built. I think the conservationists will get behind that.

And did we mention that multimilliondollar home owners tend to not invite the general public to tromp around their historic estates? So much the better to preserve the unique charm of the site!

The Civil War Preservation Trust created this paradigm. This Fort Pemberton page was taken out of CWPT's playbook.

The preservation disaster continues. Unlike natural disasters, this one has leadership.

Locals neglect own battlefield - dog bites man

This freelance writer has his eye on one of those battlefields not included in the master narratives of the Civil War:

Piedmont seems destined to remain The Battle that Never Was so far as local officialdom is concerned, despite its importance as the fight that lost the Shenandoah for the Confederacy, and the site of some of the worst military violence ever to take place in the Valley.

Note the reference to local officialdom. He's lucky the local editor did not edit out his local reference. I like the comment, though.

What is it that makes local officialdom consistently anti-local in its Civil War history? I tend to think it's a lust for framework, the need to simplify, and the siren song of "big picture." The Centennial views of the conflict are made to order for tour guides and tourism officials ... they just don't serve history, national or local.

I am reminded of local music reviewers whose universal model for success is not any kind of aesthetic criteria or even selfish enjoyment but rather commercial national success.

When this sort of writer interviews a musician, the entire discussion centers on matters of career progression. The Civil War history equivalent is the question of your local battle "making the big leagues" - as certified by others. More from our astute friend:

Fortunately, a bronze marker was placed at the site in the 1930s, and the accuracy of its location is a lucky break for today's visitor. Whoever placed it — a Civil War veteran perhaps — knew something that later historians would otherwise have had no way of knowing.

Nor will they ever care to know - now that history models showbiz and "the man in the wraparound shades" calls the shots (as the Washington Post has referred to a the Pre-Eminent Civil War Historian of Our Times).

We would expect locals to inundate us with local history - more about the Battle of Piedmont than could fill a book. Those were old locals. They planted their lonely sign and moved on. The new locals found no reference to the battle in the CWPT's most endangered battlefields list, McPherson's Battle Cry, or Ken Burns' teleplay.

Grumble Jones vs. David Hunter (top, right). Worth a dozen new markers, in my book.

As Mark Twain once said ...

... I'm too busy tonight to write a short letter, so forgive this long one.

In putting together this year's Civil War Book News, I noticed more than a few things just a third of the way through the year's list. In no particular order, here are some impressions.

* Biographers are now debunking Nathan Bedford Forrest (even). (As Eric Wittenberg has also done on his blog.)

* Tom Desjardin spearheaded a downward revision of the importance of Little Round Top last year; the counterattack has begun.

* The Grant party in ACW publishing continues (see here and here).

* Mark Neely suggests that maybe party strife was not good for effective war management and that there might have been excesses in Republican patronage that harmed the cause. (Thuds indicate sound of Centennialists falling out of their chairs.)

* Little Phil, penned by blogger Eric Wittenberg, I've written about here already. Now I need to compare and contrast blogger Mark Grimsley's And Keep Moving On with a book by Civil War Talk Radio's Gerald Prokopowicz's All for the Regiment. The two books have some yin-yang going on the metathesis level.

* There are a number of new studies, fairly obscure, that touch on McClellan and therefore interest me: the long-out-of-print How we Elected Lincoln suggests an wisecrack - "Fraud?" Meanwhile, I can hardly wait to get hold of Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia. Not to mention Veterinary Service during the American Civil War, which should enrich some of the excellent analysis previously supplied on this by Hagerman.

* Yankee spy Elizabeth Lew has gotten her story told.

* And I am always interested in the doings of Hans Trefousse, long may he prosper. T. Harry Williams imagined Lincoln-the-Conservative driven by the radicals into adopting their policies against his will (Lincoln and the Radicals); the Centennialists imagine Lincoln the pragmatist adopting radicalism as the rational outcome of the course of the war; Trefousse, bless him, envisions Lincoln as radical from the first manipulating conservatives to achieve what he knows needs to be done.

Lincoln, First Among Radicals, were it a book title, might encapsulate his views. Shake 'em up good, Hans.

NEWS | Old Gettysburg Village to lose four of its shops * Benton considers historic commission to deal with 80+ ACW sites * Lowry exploits remembered in NC

Civil War Book News

Civil War Book News has been updated halfway through April 2005 with more to come.

 

By the way, whew.

 

Lots of titles, especially with the small-run presses. Two things that struck me: (1) Rowan & Littlefield has jumped into ACW publishing with both feet. That's a major new force on the scene. (2) Random House is now diving into the more detailed, scholarly topics, witness Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine by Ira M. Rutkow. Is this a testing of the waters?

 

More observations later tonight - lots of interesting things happening in 2005 - if I can get myself mobilized after 8:00 pm.

Team of Rivals vs. First Among Equals

Isn't it funny that veteran Lincoln scholar Hans Trefousse got his First Among Equals out before Team of Rivals appeared? The publisher says,

 

Trefousse carefully crafts a clear picture of how his contemporaries measured Lincoln's great strengths - and shortcomings.

 

Would love to see the Cabinet material in First Among Equals. Might actually find an insight....

Military reform

Even the Washington Post's ahistorical, live-in-the-moment journalists are smelling the coffee :

 

"Imagine after the Battle of Fredericksburg, during the Civil War, if Jefferson Davis had sent Gen. Robert E. Lee a telegram saying: "You've been out there for a year now. Why don't you come back to Richmond?"

 

It may be hard to reform an army in war, but it has to be done.

NEWS | Civil War Museum may benefit from Washington bill * Kentucky's statue struggle stems from Civil War * Edgecombe County moves along on Civil War trail

Civil War Book News...

... is finally being updated. About 10 minutes after this post goes up, I should have Jan/Feb listings published. Am shooting for June to be competed by Sunday.

There was no intention to make this a once-a-year update, but my tech hurdles this year have been remarkable.

I am, once again, humbled and gratified by the quantity and quality of the revisionism in ACW publishing. When I started Book News in 1998, our prospects as advanced readers seemed hopeless, the Centennial grip on the field being heavy and encompassing. The taste for nonsense was ovewhelming and publishers were hell-bent on seeking the lowest level of readership possible.

We have so much to be thankful for. I need to write about that in specific terms - and I will in the weeks ahead.

This has been a great year. Go to a bookstore and take advantage of it.

Enter Tor, but where's Loki?

One of the interesting side-effects of the success of the Gingrich-Forstchen alternative histories of Gettysburg – Forstchen being an established, successful fantasy author – is the venture of sci-fi/fantasy powerhouse trade marque Tor Books into Civil War nonfiction. Witness: Whip the Rebellion: Ulysses S. Grant's Rise To Command by George Walsh, published by Tor.

My hair-trigger judgement dumps this effort into the Centennialist minden heap, with one bit worth noting - author Walsh is a product/creation of ACW fiction, specifically Killer Angels. (See here for details.) He may have writings especially tasty to pulp fiction readers.

(Harry Turtledove’s successful series of Civil War fantasies may also have influenced this development.)

I think the Centennial interpretation of ACW history is very congenial to straight-ahead sci-fi of the Edgar Rice Burroughs type. This has to do with stylistic bias.

Scifi tends to be overwhelmingly conservative stylistically and culturally - favoring the most obvious forms of storytelling ... as is the case in all genre fiction. The principal work of the Centennialists has been to convert wild and wooly controversies - in their thousands - into a manageable mini-sets of predictable story elements.

I have long thought that ACW authors like William Davis – a Centennial stalwart - borrow heavily from pulp fiction literary techniques, Burroughs being a giant in pulp fiction. It may be worth a post to explore the direct borrowings and correlate these to practicing nonfiction hacks.

Meanwhile, the ray of hope here is that sci-fi fans, despite their hidebound literary tastes, view themselves as adventurous renegades with a tolerance for “weird.”

So the prospect of a sci-fi trade house going into ACW nonfiction encourages in us a certain amount of optimism. I hope some of the ACW revisionist authors dissatisfied with University Press outcomes will test the waters with new Tor submissions.

Are sci-fi/fantasy readers worth having in ACW nonfiction? Reading Blogfonte tells me "Yes, definitely."

Let’s see how “far out” Tor and its base may be willing to go.

NEWS | No news today

Another McPherson student identified: Catherine Clinton

After a lifetime in teaching, you would expect a world-famous professor - generally thought to be God's gift to Civil War studies - to have a few high-profile students in his chosen field. So far, I believe we have identified just two McPherson students at play in our field, one, teaching at Princeton, the other the methodologically challenged author Tom Carhart.

 

Here's one more, Catharine Clinton, with the McPherson connection documented here.

 

That might explain Doris Kearns Goodwin's blurbing of Clinton's 2004 Tubman book. Goodwin's a McPherson friend and McPherson staked his presidency of the AHA to lash out at her plagiarism accusers.Given the tiny number of McPherson students thus far identified, one could reasonably say she seems to be his "star."

 

Clinton may not count as a Civil War historian per se, however. She comes out of McPherson's own background of race relations history and her biggest project, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, is more of an American Studies item.

 

It also represents a small failure. The hardback did well enough for trade house Little, Brown to encourage issue of a paperback version this January. That paperback is now deeply discounted, from $14.95 list to $4.98 on B&N.

 

Clinton is prolific, but not in the Civil War genre. Notice (in the link) the number of gender studies deployed. I am not sure Dr. McPherson is at all cool with gender studies. His references to it, in interview after interview, are ambiguously neutral. Here, I think, he actually shows mild hostility:

 

There is increasing focus on fields like environmental history and women's history and social history and cliometrics, which is a sort of quantitative economic history with a specialized language. All of this makes what a lot of academic historians write either unintelligible or uninteresting to a broad lay audience. But it is what earns promotions, what earns tenure, what earns grants.

 

Maybe Clinton is compromised in McPherson's personal esteem. I'll have to check her tomes for McPherson blurbs to find out.

 

[Send in your famous McPhersonites, should you find any.]

NEWS | School House Ridge property acquired for Harpers Ferry National Historical Park * State funds sought for museum, White House of the Confederacy * Tale of Norwegians in the ACW slated for Chickamauga event

Better books

Ah, there's a mundane explanation for why the Pal Benko book is so good. I found this at Chess Cafe:

IM Jeremy Silman (the "Sil" in Siles Press) came to know and admire Benko in the 1990s, and conceived the notion of producing an ideal biography, one that would "demonstrate my own vision of how such a book should be presented." Incontrast to the common run of instant books and carelessly assembled rehashes, Silman's project took five years, and the results are impressive.

 

The book was intended as an example to chess presses in general. Meanwhile, Presidio Press seems to be getting into a similar game with The Civil War Experience 1861-1865.The book includes slip-covered document facsimiles and an audio tape. But $50 for a 64-page coffee-table book?

NEWS | National Park Service shows interest in Pemberton Civil War home * Civil War cyclorama to be restored  * Buffs clean up Fort D in MO

Publishing gambits

I stopped by Reston's Barnes & Noble to see if I could find Goodwin's new book Team of Rivals and her Lincoln quote "What's up?" – was it sourced or not?

 

I am close to buying her book just to run down the notes, a malicious pleasure I treat myself to once in a great while. But what's holding me back is what bothers Eric Wittenberg – financially rewarding someone who has badly mistreated another author and then cruelly failed to make amends. St. Martins Press now reissuing her unrevised and disgraced work - with all plagiarized material intact - to piggyback on the expected success of Team of Rivals - sets a new low for sleaziness in publishing.

 

To buy or not to buy? But I'm getting ahead of my story.

 

For what interests me is that B&N did not have a Team of Rivals display. There was a biographies shelf, hello Tab Hunter, no Goodwin here, and there was a "new biographies" table prominently featuring work by Alan Alda, no less. The Civil War and Lincoln sections did not have it.

 

I could not find Team of Rivals. Maybe it sold out.

 

In the games section my eye stopped on a book almost as thick as Team of Rivals. It was Pal Benko's 2004  autobiography.

 

Pal Benko is a second tier grandmaster, an Hungarian immigrant. From 1958 on, he was "the other child prodigy" whose career developed in the shadow of Bobby Fischer's. My father and I used to see him (and Fischer) at the Manhattan Chess Club in the late 1950s. I studied his games as a youth. The name evokes an intense nostalgia for me.

 

Chess publishing is small business compared to Civil War bookselling. I don't know a trade house or university press that will touch chess. The field belongs to tiny commercial publishers.

 

Benko's autobiography is gorgeous – as fine a vestige of the publishing tradition as one could ask for. Great paper and binding; a vast number of pages; liberal distribution of photos throughout; and excellent jacket and book design. And there it was, prominently displayed in a huge retail outlet. As it has been, presumably, for the last 18 months.With the in-store discount, it was available for under $39.

 

I had a flashback to a Civil War title purchased there last week. At about $35, it was sold shrink-wrapped to prevent me opening and skimming the contents. It sported naked cardboard  "hardcover" with a figleaf of cloth on the spine, cheap paper, skimpy index, and a great many necessary diagrams drawn smearily by the author himself with a broken-tipped felt marker. University imprint.

 

There is a lot more love and goodwill in chess publishing than in ACW publishing.

 

If the Goodwin affair teaches us how low this business can go, the Benko book gives our field a standard to imitate.

Sup, Lincoln?

McClellan Society member Harry Smeltzer notes that ...

I have to take issue with the criticism of her (Goodwin's) use of the term "What's up?" in her apparently created Lincoln dialogue.  I believe the term was in vogue at the time, and recall its use by Francis Donaldson of the 118^th PA (I think) in his letters published as "Inside the Army of the Potomac".  Sometimes it's hard to believe that we did not create all the slang and cuss used today in the last 50 years.

Team of Rivals review roundup

Drudge is reporting today that Goodwin's Team of Rivals has passed 79,000 copies in sales. HNN is using the opportunity to remind us of her 2002 schweinerei and you really can't do better to inform yourself than read this by Philip Nobile.

 

I am having a great deal of difficulty finding reviews of her work by scholars and other informed readers; pop culture reviews are plentiful, though, so let's get to them.

 

Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette declares that "Goodwin takes no chances" - "Goodwin and company have little new to tell us and stick to the standard fare. Most of the familiar Lincoln stories are here -- from the suggestion from a young girl that he grow a beard to his attitude about Ulysses Grant's drinking." She does introduce this novelty, the reviewer says: "Goodwin describes the scene when an aide to Stanton visits Lincoln's office to ask a question: Lincoln greeted him. 'What's up?' Really? What's up with that?"

 

Invented dialog with a contemporary flavor: I love it. It calls to mind the title of an Arakansas paper's review: "Again with the Lincoln books!" ( subscription required).

 

The editor of Concord's Monitor is harsher. He says "In writing Team of Rivals she toiled under the burden of the controversy, and it shows." Pronouncing her "timid," he says "Goodwin not only loses the thread of her tale but also ignores the historian's greatest challenge: to bring fresh interpretation to the past. No historian or biographer should be satisfied merely to master the material well enough to recount events while leaving the interpretation to others. Yet this is precisely what Goodwin does."

 

This Bloomberg writer notes that this "is in many ways more a story of Goodwin than it is of Lincoln." However, "It is good to have her back," he purrs.

 

The Oregonian thinks that this is "one of the most compulsively readable books of history for a general audience to come along in a long time." It has a sharp eye out for troublemakers, too: "No doubt there will be those whose only interest in this book is playing "gotcha," looking for errors or for 'copying.' Here's hoping Goodwin's hundreds of endnote attributions are accurate and detailed enough to frustrate them..."

 

What's up? Myself, I like it when the wiseguys play gotcha with authors guilty of faking dialog and "copying" other authors. But I wouldn't expect a newspaper writer to feel that way.

 

James McPherson, who used his presidency of the AHA to attack Goodwin's plagiarism accusers in 2002, has stepped up to the plate to toss her a few rose petals in the New York Times, following a cruel review in those pages in October ( subscription required). This seems to be the third review of the book that paper has run, if you count this one.

 

The Cristian Science Monitor declares this "powerful" and "delicious" while trying to keep the author, and her moral stains, at arm's length. Having your cake and eating it is irresistible, I suppose.

 

On the other hand, Knight-Ridder news service manages to "review" the book without giving a single opinion. See for yourself!

 

Kentucky's Herald Leader thinks this is challenging reading, while asking "Was Honest Abe the Slick Willie of the 19th century?"

 

Doris Kearns Goodwin could give him slickness lessons.