Last week featured another of my infamous banzai runs. On Thursday night, I was scheduled to speak to the Hagerstown Civil War Roundtable, so I drove over that morning. Now, it’s about 350 miles from my house to the meeting place/hotel, so it took me about 5.75 hours to make the drive. I went straight to the Antietam National Battlefield, where I met up with fellow blogger and friend John Hoptak. This was my second visit to Antietam in two weeks. Along with three friends, I had spent a weekend stomping the battlefield with old friend Dr. Tom Clemens just ten days earlier.

John and I spent most of our time together hiking the portion of …

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Thanks to Prof. Chris Stowe for bringing this to my attention.

A fourth grade textbook that has been published draws on neo-Confederate doctrine to claim that there were thousands of black Confederate soldiers with the Army of Northern Virginia, including two full battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson. The source for this drivel was the website of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization which has lost all credibility in its drive to try to find some good in slavery as a means of advancing the neo-Confederate agenda. Instead of doing real research, the idiot author parroted this swill–flagrantly false swill–and has promulgated it to unsuspecting children, who are going to think that this nonsense is historical truth. …

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Friends, we have a chance to create a new battlefield park at a place that’s near and dear to my heart, Monterey Pass, in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. From yesterday’s edition of The Waynesboro Record-Herald newspaper:

Monterey Pass Civil War battlefield in line for grant
Donations needed to match funds to create interpretive center

By Denise Bonura
The Record Herald
Posted Oct 19, 2010 @ 01:13 PM

Blue Ridge Summit, Pa. —

The Monterey Pass Battlefield Association is one step closer to preserving the history of the Civil War battle, thanks to a grant from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

DCNR announced last week Washington Township will receive $41,900 of a matching grant if the remaining funds

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This post is a month overdue, and I regret that. I’ve been struggling with symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, and I have been trying to keep from typing as much as possible. I actually have been largely avoiding it, and it’s paid off, because the symptoms–quite painful and unpleasant, by the way–have abated some. The trade-off for that is that there just haven’t been any posts since September 30. Please forgive me for that.

Prof. Joseph L. Harsh of George Mason University passed away on September 13. After overcoming modest roots in Hagerstown, Maryland, Joe dedicated his entire life to the study of the 1862 Maryland Campaign, and wrote an absolutely brilliant strategic analysis of the first …

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Thanks to Glenn Williams, National Park Service historian for sharing this. I hereby adopt this as my code.

A Historian’s Code

1. I will footnote (or endnote) all my sources (none of this MLA or social science parenthetical business).

2. If I do not reference my sources accurately, I will surely perish in the fires of various real or metaphorical infernal regions and I will completely deserve it. I have been warned.

3. I will respect the hard-won historical gains of those historians in whose steps I walk and will share such knowledge as is mine with all other historians (as they doubtless will cheerfully share it with me).

4. I will not be ashamed to say “I do not

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Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s faithful and famous war horse, Old Baldy came home yesterday. It’s about time.

From today’s issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Old Baldy returns to Grand Army of the Republic Museum

By Michael Vitez

Inquirer Staff Writer

Old Baldy came home Sunday.

And it was a fine new home, and homecoming, for the preserved head of one of the most famous horses in the land, at the Grand Army of the Republic Museum in the city’s Frankford section.

Old Baldy was no thoroughbred, just a handsome, brown horse with four white feet and a white blaze on his face. But he survived a Triple Crown of his own – shrapnel to the nose and flank

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A number of months ago, I posted about Capt. Paul von Koenig, who was killed at the Battle of White Sulphur Springs, and who obviously plays a major role in the tale of that battle that I am beginning to write. I had a really difficult time finding anything substantive about him for a long time, and almost nothing about his life in Germany. The bulk of what I found deals strictly with his short 2.5 years here in the United States.

Captain von Koenig was actually Baron von Koenig, and he was a member of an ancient ennobled family from Lower Saxony that dates back to at least the 17th Century. One of Paul von Koenig’s brothers was a …

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Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog, and my 1082nd post here. There have only been 82 posts this year, largely because I took several months off from blogging entirely after averaging 250 posts per year for four years, and then because I decided to only post when I had something worthwhile to say instead of posting just for the sake of posting. I hope that you haven’t been disappointed by the relative paucity of posts this year, but I have found it more rewarding to post only when I have something worthy of saying.

I know that I say this every year, but it is true every year, and remains true…..

I started this blog as a little …

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In 1882, General William T. Sherman donated a twelve-pound Parrott gun to his home town of Lancaster, Ohio. That gun is still there to this day, situated in a small city park next to a monument to Cump Sherman. Unfortunately, the ravages of time and weather haven’t been kind to the gun’s carriage, which is rapidly deteriorating. The local SCV camp has taken on a campaign to Save the Cannon, by raising funds to replace the carriage. On October 23, the campaign is hosting an evening with General Sherman to raise funds for the purchase of a new carriage, and I’ve donated some books for the fundraising auction and also just purchased a brick in honor of all the …

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Susan and I visited some friends in Springfield, Illinois this weekend. We just got home. They only moved there a few months ago, so this was our first time out to visit them. It was also my first visit to Springfield, which means it’s the first time I’ve seen any of the Lincoln sites there.

Springfield, of course, was Abraham Lincoln’s home for something like 17 years before his election as President of the United States, and his body was returned there for entombment after his assassination. He lived there, practiced law there, and raised his family there. Even though Springfield is the capital of Illinois to this day, Abraham Lincoln’s presence is everywhere there. It’s unavoidable.

In downtown Springfield, …

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