Category: Anecdotes
-
Short Takes
In secession news, the latest candidate is Hawaii, or Hawai’i if you prefer. Even more so than Texas Hawaii has a unique state history, being the only state annexed by what some have termed an imperialist coup. Matt Welch takes a look at the prospects in Reason magazine. Shooting Times takes a nostalgic look at […]
-
Modest Heroes
Eric Wittenberg has a couple of posts on David F. Day, a brave man who won a Medal of Honor but who had an unfortunate habit of boasting about himself and shamelessly embellishing his deeds. The Southern equivalent would be Lamar Fontaine, who I will write about at some point, and of course Hiram Berdan. […]
-
Soldiers, Deserters, and Turncoats
Both the Union and Confederacy had to fight two wars—one against their external enemy, one against their own people. Some people simply wanted to avoid the war or military service, while others willingly drew the sword against their own people. In the Union it was relatively easy to avoid military service; in the Confederacy it […]
-
Short Takes
My local Public Radio station, WNCW, has been playing cuts from a Civil War concept album by Russell Johnson and Barney Rogers, When the Bands Played. Since these are Tarheel musicians, it is sung from the Southern viewpoint. My favorite, naturally, was the “Sharpshooter’s Blues.” If you like Bluegrass or Old Time music, WNCW has […]
-
John West—Hero or Blowhard?
Every war produces heroes, but also a number of blowhards, who somehow always seem to outnumber the heroes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s who. One such case is John West, who claimed to be a “noted sharpshooter” in Virginia armed with a Whitworth rifle. I first ran across West’s account in John Morrow’s The […]
-
The Lone Marksman
As a followup to my previous post about a present-day marksman in Afghanistan, I am posting (with his kind permission) Gary Yee’s article about a lone marksman at the Battle of New Orleans and the effect he had. Gary, who will be coming out with a sharpshooting book of his own shortly, is one of […]
-
A Rifleman At War
There’s a lot of ongoing controversy about the effect of the rifle in battle, but there’s no question that in certain times and places an individual rifleman can have a powerful effect. One such example comes to us from Afghanistan: During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun […]