When you can tell a book by its title

Out in paper today: The Antietam Campaign, an essay collection.

Would you buy a book with that title? Or would you read the title as a foretaste of catastrophic analytic failure by its editor?

You might even wonder if there were enough books on the Maryland Campaign already, but then you'd be making the same mistake Gary "Stop the Madness" Gallagher made when he but the kibosh on more Stuart at Gettyburg publishing.

Gallagher happens to be the editor of this Antietam "madness" by the way.

A few years ago in a Usenet post not indexed on Google Groups, Brooks Simpson recounted how he had been solicited to contribute to this collection. He thought he was telling an anecdote complimentary to Gary Gallgher. He said he (Brooks Simpson) proposed to show McClellan had reason to pause after Antietam and that Gallagher, emphasizing strong disagreement with such an idea, encouraged the essay's submission anyway.

An editor with strong opinions allows a much-published author and scholar his own view. Oh, how impressive.

Assuming that Simpson's piece would be the only reasonable offering in this project and still suffering indigestion from the collection of rants that comprised Gallagher's first "Antietam Campaign" collection, I decided to give this title a pass. I stopped the madness. Now I'm counting on one of his friends to tell Gallagher why there never was anything called "The Antietam Campaign."

Everyday leadership psychosis

Today's lesson for MBA wannabes, free of charge:

(1) You are training to be a middle manager, not a leader.

(2) The day-to-day demands of your job will prevent you from developing into a leader in almost any sense of the word nor is it ever likely you will be perceived as one. Nothing you study can change that. It's not you, it's the job.

(3) Visiting a battlefield does not entitle you to put yourself in league with a Hooker or Lee. Resist the temptation. Think of yourself more as the leader of some mule train off in the distance.

(4) Having a strategy discussion after two hours of guided tours will not make you a leader. It relates more to being a camp follower or newspaper reader.

(5) Nothing learned on a battlefield tour maps back to your day job as a middle manager. Except one thing, that managers are not leaders.

If the tour helped you understand the unbridgeable chasm in circumstances between men willing to risk death on orders from a leader and the doings of a manager in your little work unit, then the trip will have been well worth it.

So stop talking about "leadership." Thanks.

McPherson's next book

Will it be a synthesis of the prevailing wisdom? A collection of old book reviews? Or new writing with fresh insights? Its title is to be Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. It will be out in plenty of time for the Bicentennial (October 7) and a major publisher has staked this effort: Penguin. McPherson is giving Kentucky collegians a preview of the material on March 5.

If any Cincinnati rountablers venture down to Louisville to give this the freshness test, I'd be pleased to hear from them.

The ever-expanding franchise

The Anything but Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum continues to expand its many non-Lincoln franchises.

It seems as if the officers of this institution have given up on Abe altogether.

The Davis bicentennial: slow going

Plans are creeping along for the Jeff Davis bicentennial. Notice this (emphasis added):

A bill to establish a commission "for the purpose of organizing and planning a celebration in recognition of Jefferson Davis' 200th birthday" easily passed the House, only to die in the Senate appropriations committee.

Don't think Rick Beard's "Civil War 150: The Sesquicentennial Initiative" made it that far. And unlike the Sesquicentennial, Jeff's at least got a webpage.

(Ted Savas noticed this story too.)

It's like Gettysburg out there

Oh man.

None of India's [cricket] batsmen made a big statement in the middle, yet everyone came with his own Gettysburg address.

"We had three heated RVs to treat [bike] racers, and they were overflowing. It was like Gettysburg out there."

"...if degrees of ugliness were battles in the Civil War, Kirsten would be Gettysburg."

Meanwhile, this little Gettysburg joke appears to trail reality by five years.

Comparing rail power in war (cont.)

We see from Victory Road the Rails two reasons that military business was so odious to Southern railways.

First, the Montgomery Convention set rates that could be charged for government business. I assume they were not particularly generous rates and being fixed at the outset of an inflationary economy, they must have been destructive.

Second, more damaging, the Rebel government was directed to pay for rail services in bonds not cash.

Meanwhile the railroad's vendors wanted payments in cash, not bonds, which Victory shows lost the Southern railroads considerable railroad grade steel on the open market. In fact, the bond-earning railroads were competing against the cash-paying Rebel government for all commodities in those markets.

And so, when we find, as we did, Pemberton bargaining down the price paid for standby railcar service to the level of cost, we understand that cost, lousy a deal as it is, will be paid for in bonds that mature in the middle/distant future

We also start to share some of the sensitivity felt by Robert E. Lee, who limited Pemberton's displacing of cash-paying railroad customers with dead-head sentries up and down the overloaded daily runs of the Charleston & Savannah.

Interesting to note (in Railroads of the Confederacy) the Provisional Government dropped tariffs on railroad steel in February 1861 only to impose a 15% tariff on it a month later.

Apparently, they felt the railroads were growing rich enough on government bonds (paid to cover government-set service rates) to afford a premium on the steel they needed to keep trains running.

Politically, these outcomes show a railroad business with insufficient influence in Montgomery and Richmond. Militarily, they box the South's railpower into an early version of the procurement spiral of death.

Earlier posts here and here.

Stealing the General

Russell Bonds has written a wonderful attempt at the "definitive" account of what is often called "The Great Locomotive Chase." In Stealing the General, he has garnered (on Amazon) an average of five stars for s 28 reviews. That is as remarkable a fact as the act of the New Yorker having reviewed a Civil War book at all (this one, in fact). "Magnificent" from the Wall Street Journal is probably worth a glass of champagne as well.

This is, necessarily, a narrative but one extremely rich in detail and at 464 pages not suited for a quick flip-through in the tub. I have not yet gone through the trove of endnotes yet but look forward to it. There is plenty of meat here for the analyst.

I don't mean to frighten the narrative fans peeking at this blog - this read is no chore - Bonds writes so well you wonder what the hell Georgia Law Review read like when he edited articles there.

Railroading my metaphors, I view this as a successful experiment in freighting narrative history. Joseph Harsh is the extreme example of how much load a narrative can bear and still reach the station. Russel Beatie comes next with a better balance but a bias towards extreme data loads. Russell Bonds by comaprison is a fast freight train. If you love Harsh and Beatie, as I do, Bonds' single volume will in no way annoy you with the usual narrative "fast track" disdain for data and the reader's need to inspect and weigh. This is a solid read that - falling into the wrong hands - is also "maginificent" storytelling.

Bonds paints an nice miniature of General O.M. Mitchel, mentioning that he worked at the same railroad as Banks, McClellan, and Turchin. Mitchel preceded them but that certainly got the imagination turning and is worth a post soon. I'll be also returning to General in snippets in connection with the release Vital Rails later this week.

Meanwhile, there's free reading to be had over at the publisher's lovely website. To quote Hunter Thompson, buy the ticket, take the ride.

Reviewing is hard work

The press release opens with:

The battle of Belmont was the first battle in the western theater of the Civil War and, more importantly, the first battle of the war fought by Ulysses S. Grant.

The book reviewer opens with:

The battle of Belmont--the first battle in the western theater of the Civil War and the first fought by Ulysses S. Grant--is elucidated here...

See for yourself.

He's homeless

... but he treasures his Civil War antique.

The "greatest theologian" - Lincoln?

In the current issue of First Things, author Andrew Ferguson explores Lincoln's religion and summarizes with a quote from David Donald, something like "I have no idea."

Over at HNN Lincoln author Vernon Burton asks if Lincoln was not "the greatest theologian of the 19th century..." meanwhile he has a formum with no posts.

If this is supposed to be one of those refreshing debates on Lincoln that will characterize the bicentennial, let's connect the debaters.

Royal Tenenbaum's museum

Kids donate their Civil War diorama to museum. Museum "dismantles" diorama for spare parts, claiming "inaccuracies." Museumspeak: "To vilify us for the diorama when we had a useful future for it is inappropriate."

Reminds me of a movie. Gene Hackman, playing Royal Tenenbaum, is asked by his children how he liked their 10th birthday party play. "I thought it was unrealistic," he answers.

Andy Thomas

Andy Thomas has redesigned his site: have a look. His style differes from Kunstler & Co., and he stresses Western themes. I see some small traces of Pyle and N.C. Wyeth and - in the color and seasons - some A. Wyeth (esp. this). He's an original, nonetheless.

Carman in March

Joseph Pierro notified me that the new publication date for Carman's manuscript will be March 14.

Public history and Baudrillard

Just stumbled across the incredible news that a $100 million dollar 35,000-sq ft vistitor center will be built next to the Vietnam memorial in Washington - at ten times the original cost of the monument itself.

A totally unnecessary, gratuitous project is born. Or is it gratuitous?

Journalist Steven Knipp has a very interesting take on this: these are remedial learning centers. He gets support from a planner who says

"What's going to happen in two generations when we have a whole society of people for whom the wall is just a list of names?" she asks. "Without knowing their personal sacrifices … it's just a wall with names on it."

May already be that.

The thing that intrigues me is that the government doesn't just inform, it seeks to stimulate interest in an existing historical site with a visitor center. The Center provides the rationale for why you stopped. It reinforces the "buy decision," to use an old marketing meme. Moreover, the visit can mean nothing to the kinds of numbers sites seek to attract without a center.

One difference, however, between a war memorial and say Mount Vernon is that the visitor's center at a memorial won't just inform, it is going to cue the emotional reaction of the visitor. It's going to help the tourist simulate "appropriately." The confused tourist will feel twinges of artificial grief.

Baudrillard could have had visitor centers in mind when he wrote: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory." The map here is the visitor center - a map that brings forth the experience of the memorial (or battlefield).

If I can augment a quote from Felluga Dino's Baudrillard page: "There is no longer any distinction between reality [battlefield, monument] and its representation [visitor center experience/information]."

As for other kinds of representation preceding the reality, Knipp quotes a teen visitor to the National Mall: "This is where they made that Forrest Gump movie!"

Levine speaks

From the crawl at the George Tyler Moore web site:

At 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 23, 2008, The George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University will sponsor a presentation by the winner of the 2007 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship Dr. Bruce Levine, J.G. Randall Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Levine will offer an overview of [his] book in the Visitors Center of the Antietam National Battlefield.

The book in question is Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War, released late in 2005. It was reviewed on H-Net and touched on in Kevin Levin's blog. Johnny Whitewater gave the volume an extensive going over on Brett Schulte's blog.

"Suffering" is a hit

Republic of Suffering is a hit; six editions to make a 50,000 unit print run. I have to laugh, however, at the description "It is a highbrow hardback ..." It is an extremely simple book, written at the junior high level with almost zero analytic content - a typical nonfiction bestseller, in other words. More on that soon.

The Bush family as slaveowners

The Walkers (as in GHWB) appear to have owned slaves until 1838. Not sure I understand this sentiment:

The heirs of slaveholders are not responsible for the past; but in a better world, they would be accountable for that past.

A serious Bicentennial effort

... over at C-Span.

Top ten figures from American history

Curious data from USA Today:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%2.
2. Rosa Parks: 60%3.
3. Harriet Tubman: 44%4.
4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%5.
5. Benjamin Franklin: 29%6.
6. Amelia Earhart: 25%7.
7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%8.
8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%9.
9. Thomas Edison: 18%10.
10. Albert Einstein: 16%

Hat tip to Wretchard.