History will sneak up on you

A visiting nurse was at the home of a 93-year old mid-Maryland patient this weekend. In making conversation, the nurse noticed an old photograph; it was a shot of the patient's great grandparents just after the Civil War. This patient knew the number of the slave auction block in which they had been sold. The dress in the photo was still in the attic, in great shape, along with other artifacts. The nurse urged the 93-year old to contact the local history society.

After the visit, the nurse contacted the local society herself and got a commitment that they would visit this elderly lady. "I feel really good about this," the nurse told me.

Are you prepared for a history emergency?

Andersonville, the novel

Plume has reissued the novel Andersonville:

In 1955, when MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville first came out, a reviewer for the Sun-Times called it "A great book, perhaps the greatest of all Civil War novels."

This appreciation is a piece worth reading.

Lincoln as plot device

The stream of novels driven by Lincoln-related plot devices continues. Make way for Busted Flush:

When he takes the plates to the local university, they find several rare exposures of Abraham Lincoln at the actual ceremony where he delivered the Gettysburg Address. But wait, there's more: a machine, a primitive precursor to Edison's phonograph, called a phonautograph. And after fashioning a makeshift stylus, the university's top historian discovers nothing less than a reedy, scratchy audio recording of what must be the voice of old Abe himself, actually delivering the address.

Suddenly, all sorts of lying folk, from journalists, to sleazy lawyers to speculating collectors, are crawling out of the woodwork, all claiming ownership of the priceless material or at least knowledge of what should be done with it.

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Savas Beatie has released its third newsletter

Have a look.

A model preservation group?

The Newtonia Battlefields Protection Association looks like a safe and sane group, if this article is reliable:

* Acquiring battlefield land through direct, unencumbered ownership (no easement nonsense, no federal or state money, no partnership with farmland or nature conservancies who have their own agendas).
* Incrementing land purchases opportunistically (adding mansions, cemeteries and incidental land to core battlefield holdings).
* Funding rehabilitation work out of operational budgets (scaling the work to match the budget).
* Using member labor to perform needed work (building teamwork and friendships).
* Focus, focus, focus.

"Who knows where we will be in five to 10 years? We never know. The way things are going, this thing might come along quicker than that. A grant or another donation could come along and speed the process up."

You'll be doing fine, I think.

(Shame about the website, though.)

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Australia is interested in The Historian's Conscience

This is almost beyond the American imagination:

... as the editor of The Historian's Conscience, Macintyre has invited 13 of his Australian colleagues to explain how they deal with the ethical issues arising from their work.

Ethical issues = treatment of evidence.

This is so out of the blue for American readers that when you Google "historian and ethics" you get results about historians and gratuities, historians and how they should behave institutionally, historians and plagiarism. The simple matter of standards for the ethical treatment of historical data seems to be one of those socially awkward topics that remains forever off limits in public discussion.

The American Civil War edition of of The Historian's Conscience would require black ink on black paper. And maginifying glasses. And maybe an odor detector. Not to mention rubber gloves.

File under "Dead Horse, beating of."

Get it to master the discipline

... not because a PhD will give you a living:

Openings for history faculty at the instructor and assistant professor level fell from 727 positions advertised in 2002–03 to 682 in 2003–04, the lowest point in the past five years. Most worrisome are the declines in fields with the most PhDs—North American and European history. Job openings in European history fell 18.5 percent from the year before, to 150 openings—the lowest level since the 1997–98 academic year. Openings for junior faculty in the history of North America decreased by 8.5 percent to 236 positions—again a five-year low.

And remember: there's always HAI.

Joe Brown High School?

Students at Creekland Middle School in Georgia are protesting naming a high school for Joseph E. Brown, a Confederate governor. Subscription required.

Relatives turn editor

Here's a story about another relative-turned-editor of Civil War manuscripts. His ancestor's journal records the soldier's own (slow) death.

The secrets of Fort Higley

One of Knoxville's remaining works, it's on private property. Here's a nice status report.

NEWS | Government could soon buy private Civil War collection * Civil War battle site up for sale on eBay * Confederate group, blacks to clean freeman cemetery

Jackson as teacher

I was reminded of Stonewall's teaching career by this remiscence of Frank Vandiver.

"Jackson," Frank said, "was probably the worst teacher who ever lived." The cadets in Jackson's classes at the institute hated and ridiculed him. Frank said they hurled erasers at Jackson when his back was turned and also gave him a nickname: Tom Fool Jackson.

He was due a career change.

Warning: Mozier at work

It's been awhile, but after founding the McClellan Society, I used to get these perfectly charming and guileless letters thanking me for the wonderful information, etc., and suggesting I might be interested in checking out this or that interesting author named Catton or Williams or Nevins who happened to have a different take on the general - as if the Society were formed in perfect ignorance of McClellan criticism.

I thought of that, and laughed out loud, reading an end note in John Mozier's Blitzkrieg Myth last night. He had been getting letters about an earlier book - also with "myth" in the title - which some readers innocently failed to recognize as revisionist:

"I thought I had made it clear that I didn't feel these were factors of any great importance. Perhaps that portion of my preface should have been printed in larger type..."

Mozier has this cathartic habit of arguing with the public, his readers, and pop historians in his notes:

The whole issue of numbers is treated with great coyness by historians - for obvious reasons.

Nowhere moreso than in Civil War history, I would add.

A harsh although not overly harsh judgement.

Here is reassuring a reader about his own comments on a certain general.

... the silence on the subject is suggestive.

Rather like the whole body of Civil War history. Vast, uncountable pages of silence that scream "intentional omission."

A complex and still little known matter.

Worth many suggestive silences no doubt; silence is how complexity is managed on our side of the non-fiction fence.

Readers whose most recent knowledge of D-Day comes from popular films may find this surprising, but it is true nonetheless.

Another laugh. Attention fans of Turner and Burns.

And finally, here is the Civil War predicament in a nutshell:

As is often the case in military history, when the facts conflict with national interests or personality cults, the response ... has simply been to ignore the evidence presented - the main reason why so much historical controversy is specious.

Almost the entire field of Civil War history has been and is specious. So you WWII history reformers have company.

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Those irritating Civil War business books

If there's any worse reading than a self-help book, it's a business book. And what is a business book other than an especially cloying subgenre of self-help?

Charles R. Bowery Jr. has a very nice publicity apparatus representing him as author (Lance Vargas of paitronsaintpr.com). Unfortunately, Mr. Vargas alerted me to Maj. Bowery's new Civil War business book, LEE & GRANT: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia.

If I read a bad Civil War book, I suffer deep annoyance:

McClellan, Pope, and Hooker were inflexible to a fault; as professional soldiers ... They went beyond disagreement with Lincoln into open and acrimonious arguments that were inappropriate for all concerned.

They had acrimonious arguments with Lincoln? You've given me a sense of your ability to accurately generalize. Not a good sense.

If it's an ACW business book, there's a business layer to add to the noise:

Using your authority in an autocratic way, a "my way or the highway" approach, might be within your prerogative but would do more harm than good in the long run.

Not quite. As we used to say at the Infantry School, that depends on the situation. And there are, after all, fortifications that need to be charged.

I wonder about the worldview of people who can take simple observations, develop them into ironclad paradigms and then try to apply them to a series of straw-man business constructs. The business book writer seems like a child who has learned One Great Thing in school today and is running around the house teaching everyone. Go back to school. Get some context and perspective. Respect your audience a little.

In Civil War publishing, the pattern is eternal. A reader absorbs a single view of events and makes himself champion of that view. Maj. Bowery's publisher well understands this:

Christina M. Parisi, an editor at Amacom, said most Civil War books tend to praise one general and vilify the other. Bowery's book, however, "offers a truly unique look at the two men, focusing on the face-off between the generals in their most important series of battles and giving an honest appraisal of their leadership abilities.

That's a naive view of the book's merits, but the observation of Civil War authors praising one general and vilifying the other is perfect. It is Symptom A that someone has run to the market with first impressions, regardless of how much reading followed that impression.

I once heard a newspaper editor say that her paper avoided ACW book reviews because reviewers, who tend to be buffs, simplistically praise one general and vilify the other.

The whole upside-downess of ACW literature is captured in Civil War business books when bad history is combined with bad business. We as readers are a major part of the problem; the Civil War writer starts as a reader and often starts wrong. Here's a new writer with advice that illustrates our topsy-turvy tendencies:

"The hardest thing about historical fiction is that you have to be accountable for historical detail," Barkley said. "When I let a Civil War buff read my manuscript before it was published, I learned that the description of a uniform button was inaccurate. A tiny detail like that can ruin a book’s authenticity."

This followed an admission that:

Barkley based the characteristics and personalities of the [Civil War novel's] brothers on his real life brother, Travis, and four of his college friends. Some of the commanding generals and officers in his second and third books may be reminiscent of his own law professors at Campbell...

You're writing about a button. Okay. Maybe it's a plot device. But then you populate your world with 21st Century personalities. You've got something there, but it's something I'm not buying.

Can a business ACW book be half good? Can the ACW part be sound and the biz part not? Vice versa? Or are the insights that make one half sound preventative of the other part being bad?

Let me know if you ever find a half-good or all-good ACW business book.

The evolution of publishing technology

In 1998, when I started Civil War Book News, the only options for an author with low interest in a manuscript were self-publishing or subsidy publishing. White Mane is one subsidy outlet that has brought out a number of interesting titles; I believe Stackpole, at that time, was also open to author subsidies.

These are rocky roads but not dead ends. Edward Bonekemper self-published (or subsidy published) How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War in 1997, and seven years later scored a major hit with A Victor, Not a Butcher, brought out by the small trade press Regnery. There were no books in between, as far as I know.

In about 2000, a number of new dotcom publishers, like Xlibris, began issuing Civil War titles. They were leveraging 10-15 year old print-on-demand technology to lower the costs of self-publishing, the authors still bearing all of the financial burden. Authors could now have a print run of as low as 10 copies and respond to demand with short runs.

They put a twist on the business model practiced by ancient vanity houses like Vantage. Vantage used to do a full press run (2,000 plus hardbacks), a small publicity campaign, reviewer mailouts with press releases, and it would attempt distribution through normal channels. In sum, it acted like a trade publisher based on the author's budget.

Thus, companies like Xlibris conformed more to a manufacturing model (cheap book printing) as to a vanity publishing system; they simply printed the book at the author's expense (with its profits built into even small runs) and made it available through an electronic bookstore, doing less than a Vantage. The author was the salesman and distributor.

The next generation of publishing hybrids seems to have arrived. I see that Publish America is using the short-run technology to function without taking author subsidies. Their proud claim is "We treat our authors the old fashioned way - we pay them." This youth has published a Civil War novel through Publish America.

I'll be watching for more micropublishers like this in 2005.

Manuscripts, locals, regrets

It pains me to see stories about authentic Civil War manuscripts not under contract to editors or publishers. Usually some reporter has stumbled across a family's holding and writes a piece on it. Here's a new story about the writings of an ANV enlisted man.

Every privately held manuscript deserves at least a pamphlet from the local history society.

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