• Happy 4th (and a couple of new books)

    Hope everyone is having a bang-up (so to speak) 4th of July. It was not such a great day for the Confederacy in 1863, when the news came that Vicksburg had fallen and Lee had been defeated at Gettysburg. Picked up a couple of books recently, which I will try to review in due course. […]

  • Dead Men Do Tell Tales

    In fact, they can, with modern forensic archeology, be quite eloquent. Case in point comes from the Manassas battlefield, when recent excavations have revealed quite a lot about about wounds and surgical practices. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, recently discovered remains of Union soldiers show a lot about their fate. The bones were discovered […]

  • Turner Rifle Update

    My previous post on the Turner rifle has been updated to reflect the fact that it will in fact take a standard P53 Enfield bayonet, which would make it a fully functional military rifle. It has turned out to be a fine shooter.

  • Short Takes

    Rethinking U. S. Grant seems to be the in thing right now. History has no judgment, but historians do, and these tend to run in cycles (witness views of the Confederacy). So it is with Grant, who seems to be on the upswing. Claremont Review of Books reviews some of the latest scholarship, including books […]

  • The Guns of 1866—The P53 Enfield vs. the Snider-Enfield

    Rob at Britishmuzzloaders does a practical demonstration of the differences of the P53 Enfield and the Snider Enfield. The Snider was basically a P53 that had been converted into a cartridge firing breech loader by adding a “shoe” at the breech designed by American Jacob Snider. As such it was comparable to the American “trapdoor” […]

  • Short Takes

    Apologies for the blogging hiatus but it’s been tax time and one has to give unto Caesar what is his or he’ll do bad things to you. Anyway, just a short update on the historical cleansing of, well, just about everywhere. Here in tolerant Asheville Robert E. Lee’s face was scratched off a memorial plaque, […]

  • Free Access to Fold3’s Civil War Collection (limited time)

    Business pressures and tax time have not left much for blogging, for which I apologize. Have some posts in the works, but until then here’s something from Fold3 that might interest readers. For a very limited time (until April 15th) Fold3 has their entire Civil War collection available for free access (you do have to […]

Got any book recommendations?