Astonishingly, David LeVan and his other supporters have refused to give up the ghost on the Gettysburg casino. Instead of gracefully and graciously accepting defeat and moving on to some other more productive project, they’re now considering appealing the decision of the Pennsylvania Gaming Commission to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

From yesterday’s Gettysburg Times:

Pa. Gaming board: Casino decision stays

No reason given for denial. Appeal may be next.

Posted: Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:14 pm | Updated: 12:45 pm, Thu Jun 9, 2011.

BY SCOT ANDREW PITZER Times Staff Writer

The state’s Gaming Control Board unanimously rejected a request Wednesday morning by Gettysburg-area casino developers to reconsider a licensing process that was called unfair and flawed.

As a

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Take a look at Craig Swain’s excellent report on the Stevensburg road widening project that will significantly impact an important portion of the Brandy Station battlefield. Not surprisingly, the new president and board of the Brandy Station Foundation have committed another epic failure by refusing to take a stand against the demolition of yet more of the battlefield that they have sworn an oath to protect. Why? Because, according to them, we must never, ever, ever do anything that could be construed as ruffling the feathers of the local landowners.

EPIC FAIL.

It is now quite clear that the BSF and its present officers and board members have made themselves entirely irrelevant by abrogating their obligation to preserve the battlefield.…

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Today is the 148th anniversary of the largest cavalry battle ever fought on the North American continent, the Battle of Brandy Station. For fourteen long hours that day, approximately 21,000 Union and Confederate cavalrymen slugged it out. Fleetwood Hill–the most fought over piece of real estate in the United States–was the vortex of much of that fighting.

I wonder what the veterans who sacrificed so much on June 9, 1863 would think of that hideous McMansion that disrupts their battlefield, and I wonder if they would be as horrified by Lake Troilo as I am.

We know that the board of trustees and president of the Brandy Station Foundation don’t care–they couldn’t possibly ever think of interfering with private property …

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Welcome to The History Press as a sponsor of this blog! The Press published my book on the Battle of Brandy Station, and it will also publish the one that I’m in the midst of writing, which addresses the August 26-27, 1863 Battle of White Sulphur Springs. I have added the Press to the list of sponsors below, and am glad to it as a sponsor of this blog.

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I suffered through 45 minutes of Gettysburg on the History Channel last night. With brothers Ridley and Tony Scott as directors and producers, I had high hopes for this production. The Scotts are two of my very favorite directors, and they are known for the quality of their productions.

What a staggering disappointment this thing was. I turned it off after 45 minutes because I couldn’t take another moment of it. This thing was shockingly bad. Events were presented horribly out of context, with absolutely no stage setting. The movie begins with the Iron Brigade’s advance to the unfinished railroad cut and without any context for the viewer to understand how they got there or why they were there. It …

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With thanks to Bud Hall–a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War himself–for passing this along to me, I give you the words of the great American poet, Archibald MacLeish, who offered this elegy:

Who in the still houses has not heard them? The soldiers say: “Our deaths are not ours; they are yours. They will mean what you make them mean.”

They say: “Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing, we cannot say. It is you who must say this.”

They say: “We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning. We were young, we had died, remember us.”

Thank you to all of the veterans who gave the last …

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The other day, I got an e-mail from Mark Gaffney, who is the owner and webmaster of a very useful web site called Impediments of War. The site was designed to be, and acts as, the archive for all of the episodes of Civil War Talk Radio, a weekly program hosted by Prof. Gerry Prokopowicz, the chairman of the history department at East Carolina University.

This is the e-mail that Mark sent me:

My website is titled Impediments of War and is intended to be a Companion Website to Civil War Talk Radio. My inspiration was Dyer’s Compendium, I originally had the website subtitled “A Compendium of Civil War Talk Radio,” but decided it was a big

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Craig Swain, a former member of the board of trustees of the Brandy Station Foundation, has written an excellent and concise summary of his concerns about, and dealings with, Joseph McKinney and the rest of the appeasers on the board. I commend it to you. It can be found here. Well said, Craig. It is indeed a tragedy when a preservation organization ceases doing preservation work on the battlefield it is supposedly the steward for. It’s an even greater tragedy when a preservation organization begins to oppose the very preservation work it was created to perform.

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John Hennessy, who as chief historian for the Fredericksburg/Chancellorsville/Wilderness/Spotsylvania battlefield complex, knows a bit about battlefield preservation, also left a very succinct and well-put comment on the post where I described the ill-advised and wrong-headed policy declaration by the BSF. John began by quoting the BSF statement, drafted to supposedly allay our concerns that the BSF is on top of things, and then reacted to it:

“Frequently landowners are required to obtain permits before making improvements or undertaking certain agricultural activities. We view the permit process primarily as an issue between the landowner and the governmental agency exercising legal or regulatory authority over the matter.”

While anyone may choose to view the permit process as an issue between the landowner

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A particularly insightful comment was left on this blog pertaining to the outrageously inappropriate policy statement issued by the BSF:

Mike Stevens, the president of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust–a legitimate battlefield preservation group that has done some fabulous work in the Fredericksburg area–wrote:

Surely no one who understands what this ground means to us and to our country would allow its destruction and desecration without standing up and saying, “No!”

Surely any battlefield preservation organization with its priorities straight would do the same.

It appears that the only positive thing stemming from this unfortunate incident is to show how a preservation organization should NOT act.

That sums it all up quite succinctly and quite well. Shame on …

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