As a student of cavalry operations, I pride myself on visiting and learning about obscure and out of the way cavalry battlefields. I’ve been to some extremely obscure places in my day.

One of my very favorite Civil War cavalry battlefields has always been the little gem of a cavalry battlefield at Hunterstown, about six miles north of Gettysburg. On July 2, 1863, Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick’s division, marching for Gettysburg, ran into the rear guard of Brig. Gen. Wade Hampton’s Confederate cavalry brigade at Hunterstown, and a nasty little fight evolved from this meeting engagement. Brig. Gen. George Custer led an impetuous charge, and was nearly killed and then captured when his horse was shot out from under him …

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I wanted to give everyone an update as to the status of the book on Stuart’s Ride during the Gettysburg Campaign that I did with J. D. Petruzzi.

Originally, the book was supposed to have been published by now. We had hoped and expected that it would have been out by now, or at least that was the plan. However, the History and Military Book Clubs were evaluating the book, and that process took an unreasonably long period of time, something like two months. That obviously trashed the time line for the release of the date, and meant that we missed the 143rd anniversary event commemorating Corbit’s Charge in Westminster, MD this weekend. We had originally hoped that the book …

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The most recent issue of Blue & Gray magazine featured a re-interpretation of Brig. Gen. Elon J. Farnsworth’s charge and death on July 3, 1863 after the repulse of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. The author, a licensed battlefield guide, has been working on this theory for years, and I’ve been waiting to see and read an elaboration of it for a long time. So, so far as that goes, I was very pleased to finally see the theory spelled out in black and white.

Now, this is a topic that I know a little bit about. Although it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve worked on it in any detail, my first book dealt with Farnsworth’s Charge …

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I’ve been involved in on-line discussion groups about the Civil War since 1996. We got our first Internet access that year, and Susan discovered the Gettysburg Discussion Group for me. The GDG is the oldest, and probably largest, of the on-line discussion groups. It’s the granddaddy of them all. I signed up, and have been a member for most of the intervening decade. As the years passed, I started my own group along with old friend Teej Smith.

We started as an e-mail discussion group. I am the co-moderator of that group, although I tend to leave much of the day-to-day moderation to Teej. The e-mail group is very small, by our choice. It has only about 100 members, of …

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As promised, today I will tackle some the mechanics of how I write. No, I don’t mean noun, verb, adverb, preposition. What I mean is how I get to finished product.

By way of background, my style has always been to permit the soldiers to tell their own stories in their own words wherever possible. I therefore often see my role as narrator, connecting their stories in the proper factual context, so that the whole thing makes sense and is historically correct.

Also, as my regular readers know, I am a lawyer. I write pretty much all day every day. Due to the nature of what I do, I rarely have the luxury of spending hours and hours laboring over …

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In a comment to last night’s post, Charles Bowery asked, “You may have done this before, but for the benefit of the members of your fan club who also write, could you do an entry describing your work methods? How much time you spend daily, how you set up your space, how you use technology/notes, etc.” Good questions, Charles. Interestingly, I had already thought of addressing these questions on my own, and was intending to do so. I’m going to break this up into a couple of pieces, so the first part will run tonight and the rest tomorrow night. Tonight, I will address the logistical issues that Charles mentioned in his comment, and tomorrow night, I will address …

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Although I have done some tweaking and tinkering, trying to complete the draft of a chapter that had been hanging, and also in messing around with wrapping up the Rush’s Lancers regimental history project (which took much longer than I thought it would, by the way), I finally got back to work on Dahlgren tonight for real. The last time that I really sat down and wrote, pulling together a new chapter, was the night of March 7, which was the night that Cleo had her stroke. Between having to put her down, and then with the puppy’s arrival, I simply haven’t been able to write in any consequence since then.

Susan and I also have an on-line bookselling business. …

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Last November 2, I posed a question to you, my loyal readers, that has concerned me for a long time: With respect to Ulric Dahlgren’s apparent plan to kidnap and/or assassinate Jefferson Davis during the March 1864 raid on Richmond, what did Lincoln know about this plan, and when did he know it? Eleven responses were posted, but three of them were by the same person, and I also answered a couple of comments. Thus, only about six of you weighed in on this important question. I was looking for other people’s opinions, and while a few of you gave them, most didn’t. I did so, hoping that your input might help me to finally draw my own conclusions as …

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When we were in Gettysburg a couple of weekends ago, J. D. Petruzzi and I met up with Al Ovies, a fellow cavalry historian from Miami. Al was up north to see some cavalry battlefields, but more importantly, to do some research at the United States Army Military History Institute in Carlisle and also at the Gettysburg National Military Park archives.

Not having worked on anything specifically Gettysburg-related in quite a while (other than the Stuart’s Ride project, that is), I hadn’t checked the park archives for new material in several years. Al spent a couple of days there, and discovered a fragment of a memoir by Andrew D. Jackson of Co. G, 6th Michigan Cavalry, that had been donated …

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One of the things that I’m really excited about for the history of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry is the collection of illustrations that I’ve accumulated over the years. I have photos of more than 70 members of the regiment plus a bunch of other associated illustrations. They run the gamut from photos of the two regimental monuments at Gettysburg to contemporary woodcuts of the Lancers in the field, to a handsome Winslow Homer painting of Rush’s Lancers in the field in 1862. All told the book will have something in the range of 80 illustrations and about 15 maps. Finding a publisher who would permit me to use/include all of this stuff was critical to my efforts; I didn’t go …

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