Category: Guest Blogging
-
Southern Boots and Saddles
Having been on the road in Virginia, I haven’t had much opportunity to blog, which I hope to make up for in the next couple of weeks. Upcoming posts will include lots of information about the accuracy of various types of period rifles, and as we will see they did right well. Today, though, I […]
-
Couldn’t Hit an Elephant
Today, May 9, is the 142nd anniversary of the death of Major General John Sedgwick at Spotsylvania. Sedgwick was just one of hundreds killed by Confederate sharpshooters that day, who were able to give full rein to their destructiveness in the more open terrain around Spotsylvania. I won’t go into the details of the incident, […]
-
James Webb’s Confederate Tribute
James Webb, author (Fields of Fire, The Scots-Irish), Vietnam veteran, and former Secretary of the Navy, has a moving tribute to the common soldiers of the Confederacy, whom he counts as ancestors. We often are inclined to speak in grand terms of the human cost of war, but seldom do we take the time to […]
-
UT Press Civil War Sale
The University of Tennessee Press also has a Civil War book sale going on, including one I mentioned earlier by Union sharpshooter Daniel Sawtelle.
-
Computers As Research Tools
In my last post I mentioned that many older CW books (i.e. pre-1920) have made their way to the web, which has been a great help in finding some obscure tomes without having to go through interlibrary loan. Many old newspaper articles have joined them. A digitized text has another advantage as well –- many […]
-
History of Kershaw’s Brigade
One of the nice things about the internet is that many of the older works about the Civil War are now becoming available as free etexts. The latest to come up, that I found while poking around the web last night, is Augustus Dickert’s classic History of Kershaw’s Brigade. It is not paginated but appears […]
-
Sharpshooter tactics
I’ve just put a new tactics section up on my web site that shows the various missions of the sharpshooters, as well as some, like “seine hauling” for prisoners, that they invented themselves. (Follow the link at the bottom to the second page.) There are many similarities between the jobs of light infantry and light […]