TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Civil War Units

  • Roy Marcot on Berdan’s Sharpshooters

    I’ve bought a number of books lately on the Late Unpleasantness and will posting reviews as time permits. Speaking of which I should have a bit more now that my house is more or less completed (still working on the landscaping) and I have finished the awards process for a non-profit on whose board I […]

  • Osprey Publishing

    Those of us in the miniature wargaming hobby are very well aware of the British book publisher, Osprey. Based in Oxford, the company was originally created as a subsidiary of a tea company that had packaged trading cards of military aircraft with their tea products. The cards’ artist proposed a series of books on warplanes, […]

  • Union Sharpshooter Policy

    I mentioned in a previous post how state politcs affected the assigment of Union sharpshooter units, and will bring up a few more examples. It did not help that the Federals didn’t really have any sort of policy on the matter. Berdan did raise two regiments early in the war, and got on well with […]

  • That Antietam Anomaly

    Brian Downey has a new blog post up about a subject I mentioned in August — General French’s march away from the West Woods toward the Sunken Lane. This really is the mystery of the battle and I’ve often wondered why so many historians have sort of passed over it with little or no comment. […]

  • Snipers, Sharpshooters, and Designated Marksmen

    There is a great deal of confusion about the various types of riflemen and their duties, both now and in the Civil War. This is pretty obvious in a recent AP article “USMC sniper metes out swift death in Iraq.” What the author of this overwritten article is talking about is really a designated marksman, […]

  • Review: Shock Troops of the Confederacy by Fred Ray

    http://www.brettschulte.net/ACWBooks/Books/ACWUnitHistories/ShockTroopsConfederacySharpshootersRay.html Note: For those of you who missed it, you might want to check out my multi-part summary of the book, starting with Part 1. Shock Troops of the Confederacy: The Sharpshooter Battalions of the Army of Northern Virginia. Fred L. Ray. Asheville, NC: CFS Press (2006). 432 pp. 43 maps. Review Fred Ray’s Shock […]

  • Shock Troops of the Confederacy, Part 11

    Shock Troops of the Confederacy: The Sharpshooter Battalions of the Army of Northern Virginia by Fred L. Ray ISBN-10 0-9649585-5-4 ISBN-13 978-0-9649585-5-5 6 x 9 inch hardback – 450 Pages 43 Maps, 59 Illustrations Footnoted / Indexed / Complete Bibliography Publication date: Winter 2005 Price $34.95 In my last post, I covered sharpshooter weapons and […]