Hello to everyone and thanks to Brett for letting me do some guest blogging here. On a personal level I live in Asheville, NC, and run a (very) small press, CFS Press, which up until the release of my new book, Shock Troops of the Confederacy, specialized exclusively in books on flood and swiftwater rescue. Although I’ve had a lifelong interest in military history, this is my first book on the Civil War.
I got into this subject as a family history project. I found that one of my ancestors had commanded a sharpshooter company in the Army of Northern Virginia, then quickly found that there was almost no information on the sharpshooters (the last book about them was written in 1899). After accumulating a lot of research I finally decided to write a book about them, especially after seeing that many established Civil War historians misunderstood how the sharpshooters were organized and employed. Speaking of which, I’ve posted a good deal of sharpshooter-related material on my web site (www.cssharpshooters.com), and I expect to be posting a page on their tactical use in the next day or two.
At the outset I wanted to integrate the web site and the book, because as a lot of authors have found out, there is just not enough room between the covers for everything, especially background material. Thus, although I was able to post only a snippet or two of a document in the book, I was able to post the whole thing on the web. I also maintain an errata section for those inevitable mistakes, and since the book has generated several articles in magazines that don’t use footnotes, I hope to put up my sources on the web site as well. This idea appears to be spreading
Check out Beyond the Crater: The Petersburg Campaign Online for the latest on the Siege of Petersburg!
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