Research and Writing

My regular readers know that I am member of Dickinson College’s 210th graduating class, otherwise known as the Class of 1983. Some of you may also know that my friend and mentor Brian Pohanka was also an alumnus of Dickinson College. Brian was a member of the Class of 1977, although I didn’t come to know Brian until well after both of us had left Carlisle.

When it became obvious that the melanoma that took Brian’s life had returned and that things were looking bleak, Brian’s family decided to honor his life and dedication to history by endowing the Brian C. Pohanka Chair of Civil War History at Dickinson. Brian, in very typical fashion, felt it was “unseemly” (to use his word) to have such a memorial to someone who was still alive, and refused to permit the position to bear his name while he was still alive. Consequently, it was called the Dickinson College Chair of Civil War History until after his death. I was one of the few outside of the family and outside of the college administration to know about it, and I was sworn to secrecy. I respected my friend’s wishes and didn’t say anything about it until after Brian passed.

With Brian gone, the name was then changed. Prof. Matthew Pinsker was hired in 2002 to fill the position, and he has done so quite well. For those not familiar with Matt’s work, he is one of the brighter lights in the younger generation of Lincoln scholars, and Dickinson is fortunate to have a historian of his caliber filling the position.

The College has launched a wonderful project called A House Divided: The Civil War Era and Dickinson College, an on-line archive of information about my alma mater’s many contributions to the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. The project, under Matt’s direction, is still being developed and is still in the beta testing stage, but there’s some really useful and interesting information to be found there. And best of all, the dedication page on the web site says, “The House Divided website is dedicated to the memory of Brian C. Pohanka (Class of 1977).” I think Brian would be pleased. It’s a wonderful and worthy tribute to his memory and his life’s work.

For some time, I’ve been toying with the idea of researching and writing about Dickinson’s contributions to the Civil War–for some reason, an unusual number of Civil War cavalry officers were Dickinsonians–so I contacted Matt to discuss the idea. Matt has suggested that my idea be folded into A House Divided, an idea that I wholehearted embraced. It will be my honor and my pleasure to be a contributor to the project, and it will give me a way to honor the memory of my friend.

I commend the site to you, even though it’s still in the beta phase, and hope you find it interesting.

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Old friend Dave Powell left a comment on last night’s post suggesting that I include the July 13-14, 1864 Battle of Tupelo to bookend/contrast Brice’s Crossroads. Forrest was badly beaten at Tupelo, so it makes a great contrast to Brice’s Crossroads. After talking it over with Greg Biggs, I’ve decided to do just that. So, the project will now include both Brice’s Crossroads and Tupelo. It should be interesting. Thanks for the excellent suggestion, Dave.

According to the National Park Service website, there is a one-acre monument to the battle in Tupelo proper, but it appears that that one acre is about all that’s been formally preserved. Greg doesn’t know the battlefield, so the challenge is now to find someone who does. I dropped Prof. Brian Steel Wills, who wrote an excellent recent biography of Forrest, a note to inquire if he had any suggestions. If any of my readers have any suggestions as to someone who can show us the battlefield, I would be most grateful.

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For years, I’ve argued with people about Nathan Bedford Forrest. I have some extremely strong opinions about where Forrest falls in the pantheon of Civil War cavalrymen. I’ve elaborated on the issue at length here in one of my first posts on this blog. Suffice it to say that, in spite of the abuse heaped on me by the Forrest worshippers, I don’t think much of him as a cavalryman, but I admire his ability commanding mounted infantry. Thus, in my opinion, one cannot even consider Forrest a cavalryman, meaning he does not rank in my world.

In addition, I’ve always been known as an Eastern Theater guy, and I probably always will be, simply because the Eastern Theater is what interests me the most. At the same time, my friend Greg Biggs has been after me for years to do something with Western Theater cavalry, so I’ve decided to meet Greg’s challenge. The Battle of Brice’s Crossroads is generally considered to be Forrest’s greatest victory, and even though the victory at Brice’s Crossroads really had no strategic importance to speak of, it featured one of the few documented instances of a smaller force defeating a larger one by successfully executing a double envelopment. That makes it tactically interesting.

Also, I ordered the last copy of Ed Bearss’ classic Forrest at Brice’s Cross Roads and in north Mississippi in 1864 in inventory with the publisher, Morningside, yesterday. That means that the book is officially and permanently out of print, as Morningside has no intention of reprinting it. There are only three used copies for sale on the Internet, meaning that it’s few and far between. Ed’s book is the only work devoted entirely to the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads published, and it’s now out of print. This means that the battle is ripe for a new tactical treatment, and it should sell well.

So, I’m going to tackle it. Researching and writing about these fights is how I learn, and I’m looking forward to learning about this battle, and to spending time on the battlefield. Perhaps I may even end up changing my opinion of Forrest as a result. I’m intent on keeping my personal biases against Forrest from clouding my analysis of this fight, and I think I can do so. I’m looking to make my first visit to the battlefield in September.

Master cartographer Steve Stanley has agreed to do the maps for the book, which means it will have superb maps. I also intend to include a walking/driving tour with GPS coordinates. I will keep everyone posted as to my progress with this. Two of my projects with J.D. come first: our study of Jubal Early’s raid on Washington in 1864, and completing the first volume of our three-volume study of cavalry operations in the Gettysburg Campaign, so don’t look for this any time soon. I’m only just getting starting researching, and I have a lot to learn about this battle.

I owe a special tip of the hat to fellow blogger Paul Taylor, as his recent visit to Brice’s Crossroads with his son, and his description of it, is what got me interested in pursuing this project. I also owe Paul a special and public thank you for the Brice’s Crossroads and Shiloh pins that he sent along. Thanks, Paul: both for the idea to pursue this Brice’s Crossroads project, and also for the pins, which have found a home on CWPT hat.

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My friend Clark B. “Bud” Hall sent this item along today. This is great news, and an extremely generous gift that will prove invaluable to those who study the life and career of George Armstrong Custer:

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) announced today that it has donated a collection of civil war artifacts to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center’s Military History Institute in Carlisle, Penn. The historic collection, which includes more than 200 pieces, belonged to Jacob Lyman Greene, the adjutant general (chief administrative officer) to General George Custer.

“As a Fortune 100 financial services organization, we are committed to giving back to our communities. We are thus very pleased to donate this lasting collection of history to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center’s Military History Institute,” says Trish Robinson, senior vice president, Strategic Communications and Community Responsibility and deputy head of Government Relations, MassMutual. “The opportunity to honor the legacy of Jacob Greene and preserve this
collection for future generations by housing it at the U.S. Army Military History Institute is a great privilege for MassMutual.”

Greene was the fifth president of Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, which became a part of MassMutual in 1996. His collection, valued at more than $800,000, dates back to the early 1860’s during the beginning days of the Civil War. His trunk, which he left behind at Connecticut Mutual, includes a variety of his military papers, letters and commissions as well as court martial documents, for soldiers in his cavalry. In addition, the collection contains Greene’s military commission to captain signed by Abraham Lincoln and a splinter of wood from his bunk at Libby Prison, where he was once a prisoner of war.

“We know these important pieces of history will be in great hands at the institute,” notes Ms. Robinson. “Our hope is that they will shed more light on not only the lives of Jacob Greene and General Custer, but also the lives of the soldiers serving under them.”

Colonel Rob Dalessandro, Director of the Army Heritage and Education Center, echoed Ms. Robinson’s assessment. “The Jacob Greene materials are a significant addition to the Army Heritage
and Education Center’s extensive holdings on the American Civil War,” he said. “We are honored to be the stewards of Captain Greene’s legacy. His story is a fine example of the service America’s soldiers have rendered to the nation.”

MassMutual inherited the collection when Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company became a part of it. Greene’s collection was recently flown to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center.

The U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center endeavors to “Tell the Army’s Story, One Soldier at a Time.” Their collection of personal papers, photographs, manuscripts and other materials is widely
regarded as the finest collection of primary source material on the U.S. Army in the world.

Kudos to MassMutual for doing the unselfish thing and for making this archive of material available to researchers like me. Greene was captured at Trevilian Station, so he’s of great interest to me, and I wish I had had this material available to me when I was researching the story of the Battle of Trevilian Station.

Thanks also to Bud Hall for passing this along.

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I think that I have mentioned that J. D. and I are going to do a three-volume study of cavalry operations during the Gettysburg Campaign. We’re hoping that it’s going to end up being the definitive study of these operations, as Steve Stanley, who does the great maps for America’s Civil War and Hallowed Ground magazines, has agreed to do the maps for this project for us.

Tonight, I put together some prior materials that I’ve written on the June 9, 1863 Battle of Brandy Station just to see what I’ve got. A prior book of mine, The Union Cavalry Comes of Age: Hartwood Church to Brandy Station, 1863 included two chapters and a total of about 21,000 words on Brandy Station. In the five years since that book was published, I’ve acquired a great deal more primary source material.

Some of it is published material in the form of some new books that come out, such as the excellent new volume of the memoirs of several of Stuart’s horse artillerists that was just published by Bob Trout. Some of it manuscript material that has surfaced, either because I’ve found it from my own research, or because others have forwarded things to me because they think I’d be interested in them. Others are excellent contemporary newspaper accounts.

The point is that while the chapter in the new study will be based on what’s in my earlier book, I’ve got enough good new material that these chapters will end up looking quite different. And I guess that’s really what it’s all about: making good use of all of that excellent new material that always seems to surface. I’m just grateful for the opportunity to do so.

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Microsoft was true to its word. If you go to its Live Book Search site today, you will get this message: “We’re sorry, the Live Search Books service is no longer available.” I’m no fan of Microsoft under ANY circumstances; I still firmly believe it to be the Evil Empire. However, the Live Book Search feature was an extremely valuable tool that I used very extensively and with great success during the completion of the retreat book. I will miss having it available as a resource. Microsoft, demonstrating that it’s all about Microsoft and the rest of the world be damned, could have done the right thing and given all of the scanned books to Archive.org, but it has evidently elected not to do so, preferring that they go down with the ship. And that’s the greatest shame of all.

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According to this article on CNet News, Microsoft is pulling the plug on its book scanning project, essentially leaving it to Google.

404 for Microsoft’s latest decision
Posted by Charles Cooper
In the middle of a gritty search war, did Steve Ballmer just commit the mother of all mistakes?

I’ve been wondering about that ever since Microsoft said it would close its Search Books and Live Search Academic projects, thus ceding the field of book digitization to Google. (While both Live Search Books and Live Search Academic are going dark, both Google’s Book Search and Google Scholar continue to operate.)

Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft’s Search, Portal and Advertising Platform Group wrote in a blog post that “given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.”

I tried getting through to Nadella today for a better explanation but Microsoft pulled up the drawbridge. Left on my own to speculate, it appears that Microsoft was being penny-wise but pound foolish. (After all, the company was ready to buy nearly $45 billion worth of trouble integrating Yahoo.) Memo to Nadella: When you get sick of hunkering in the bunker, let’s talk.

Reading through Nadella’s blog post, this much is clear: Microsoft wants to put its search marbles into programs like Cashback, (the new Microsoft service that rebates people to buy products online), where there’s better potential for a material payback. But the search competition with Google is also partly a popularity test. Consider the following:

• Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand rightly pointed out to the New York Times that while the number of people using search book services is relatively small, it’s an influential lot with researchers and librarians and other earlier adopters. Don’t underestimate the prestige factor.

• Participation in the project allowed Microsoft to promote itself as being one of the good guys. The Open Content Alliance says it won’t scan books without first receiving permission of copyright owners. Google was sued by authors and publishers over its decision to scan copyrighted snippets without permission. Google argued that the works fell under the category of fair use. Rightly or not, however, Google was pilloried as a bad actor in this novella.

Sullivan sums it up nicely when he writes that “Microsoft got mileage out of the idea it was working with the Open Content Alliance as the “good” book search partner not encumbered by controversy that the Google Book Search service has encountered.

Now Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive is left scratching his head how to replace Microsoft’s financial support for the consortium. A decade removed from its antitrust battle with the government, Microsoft’s not as uniformly dreaded as it once was. Maybe Microsoft believes it’s in a position where it doesn’t need to buy good will any more. Still, you can never have enough friends.

I’ve also used the Internet Archive site, and find it to have some useful material. I wonder whether this decision by Microsoft will cause it to come crashing down, too.

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Last week, I was contacted by a staff researcher at a TV production company that is producing shows for The Weather Channel. The concept for the series is intriguing. They’re producing shows to explore how the weather impacted certain major historic events. And one of the episodes will focus on how the weather impacted the retreat from Gettysburg. The researcher had contacted me to request a copy of One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863.

Not only does the series sound intriguing, the prospect of having our work mentioned in a major television production makes it all the more cool. Sarah Keeney, the marketing director for Savas-Beatie, shipped a copy of the bound galleys for the book to the research assistant, so we will see where it goes from here.

I’ve been a talking head once, in a production on John Buford in 1999, back in the days when The History Channel actually showed programs on history. That was great fun. I’d love to do it again. Who knows…maybe this program for the Weather Channel will present the opportunity to do so.

I will keep you advised as to the progress of the project as I know more.

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Those of you who’ve read this blog for a long time know that in addition to my addiction to the Civil War, I am an ice hockey, NFL football, and baseball nut. Having grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs, I am well acquainted with the concept of losing. During my childhood, both the Eagles and the Phillies were atrocious. And then there was the 1973 Philadelphia 76’ers, who posted a 9-73 record, the worst record ever in the history of professional sports.

As a child, one of my very favorite books was the 1974 edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia. I would spend hours and hours going through that book reading statistics and learning about long-gone players that I had never heard of previously. In the process, I learned about some great teams and great players, but I also learned about some atrocious teams, too. With as bad as the Phillies were–in 1972, they were 54-108–I came to embrace the love of bad, losing teams. Consequently, I came up with an idea that I have always wanted to pursue but never had an opportunity to do anything with.

As a 13-year-old, I devised the idea of doing a study of the worst teams in the history of Major League Baseball, which I wanted to call The Losers. I picked out some teams and thought it would be fun to do the research for a project like this. The all-time worst team in the history of Major League Baseball was the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, which didn’t even make it all the way through the season. They went 20-134 and had to play their last 35 or so games on the road, because no National League team would come to their field to play due to no attendance. Or then, there were the 1930 Phillies, who had a team batting average in excess of .310 and a team ERA well over 6.00, meaning that even with that kind of offense, they finished dead last in the National League. Or the St. Louis Browns, who went to the World Series once in their history. Or the Washington Senators who went once, in 1924. It just seemed like a project that would be a blast.

I put this idea away years ago, never figuring I would get a chance to do anything about it. I just didn’t have the resources or knowledge how to do that sort of research, and I always had other projects.

Fellow blogger Michael Aubrecht has done a great deal of writing on baseball over the years for Baseball Almanac. He knows how to do this sort of research and also knows how to write about baseball. In the course of a few exchanges of e-mails some months ago, I mentioned my idea to Michael, who fell in love with the concept.

To make a long story short, once he recovers from the spinal fusion surgery he had yesterday, Michael’s going to tackle my project. I guess that I will receive some sort of writing credit for it, since it was my idea, but it’s mostly going to be Michael’s work product. Michael has the connections to get someone famous–hopefully, a Hall of Famer–to write an introduction to the book for us, which will make it even better still. Here’s the working title, which Michael came up with the other day: USTINK: Major League Baseball’s Terrible Teams and Pathetic Players. I like it.

I’m just thrilled that this idea I came up with 35 years ago is finally going to come to fruition. I mentioned it to Ted Savas yesterday, and he liked the idea a great deal, too.

So, stay tuned. We will see where this fun little side trip leads. Fear not–I don’t anticipate that this will serve as any major hindrance to my getting my various Civil War projects done.

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Last evening, I got an e-mail from Ted Savas indicating that the page galleys for the retreat book were ready for us to review. This is close to the end of the process; all that’s really left is to finish the copyediting and for the book to be indexed, and it’s then ready to go to the printer. I spent several hours going through the galleys, which are 536 pages without the index, and finding the sorts of very routine corrections that I would expect to find in a page galley at this phase.

After all of that work, it’s always extremely rewarding to see the book laid out in a format that is very close to what the final product will look like when published, and that’s always exciting. It means that the end is in sight.

Ted’s having some bound galleys made of the uncorrected page proofs for submission to the History Book Club and the Military Book Club for consideration as selections. Both picked up my book Battle of Monroe’s Crossroads and the Civil War’s Final Campaign , which was quite an honor. For reasons that I still don’t understand, they passed on Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg, so we’re all hoping that they will pick up the retreat book and offer it at least as an alternative selection, but hopefully, as a main selection.

I will keep you all posted as the book grinds through the publication process and as the release date draws nearer.

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