Boy, politics truly do make for strange bedfellows. Have a look at this article, which appeared on Yahoo today:

Secessionists meeting in Tennessee By BILL POOVEY, Associated Press Writer
Wed Oct 3, 3:15 AM ET

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions — New England and the South — are sitting down to talk.

Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.

That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence.

“We believe that an independent South, …

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On October 10, 2005, I made one of my first posts on this blog. It shows up as p. 23 on the blog. By comparison, this is p. 579. That post dealt with all of the reasons why I’m no fan of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

What amazes me about it is that people continue to post comments to this particular post two years later. I had a new comment posted there tonight. A number of them have contained nasty personal attacks on me just because I don’t buy into their hero worship of Forrest. Each of those has been deleted because I don’t allow personal attacks on me on my own blog.

To give the latest poster credit, he …

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I just finished spending the vast majority of my last couple of months rewriting the retreat manuscript. We did a tremendous amount of additional research–our bibliography went from 17 pages to 38 in the process. We took what started out as a general but reasonably thorough tactical study of the fighting during the retreat and turned it into a full-blown scholarly study along the lines of Plenty of Blame to Go Around. In the process, we’ve literally used hundreds of sources. I counted, and there are 807 entries in the bibliography, all of which were legitimately consulted, and hundreds of which were actually cited. I’m really proud of it.

There are lots of things that are different from Kent …

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Susan and I did something incredibly cool today. We saw something that is quite likely a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was called the The Gathering of Mustangs and Legends, held at Rickenbacker International Airport over the last four days.

The Mustangs, of course, are the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Over 100 of them were present. All are flyable, and all have been carefully and painstakingly restored to immaculate condition. The Legends are the men and women who flew them, including 80 of the surviving fighter aces of World War II. It was really an amazing event. Given that we lose 1,000 World War II veterans each day, there won’t be many more opportunities to do something like this.

When we …

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Listen closely. Can you hear it?

That strange sound that you hear emanating from the direction of New York City is the sound of the greatest choke in the history of professional sports.

Yes, the New York Mets, who had a seven game lead with seventeen to place, proceeded to reel off a dozen losses in those seventeen games, all against teams with records less than .500. Today, of course, was the clincher.

Future Hall of Famer Tom Glavine, he of the 300+ wins and three Cy Young Awards, never made it out of the first inning today, giving up 7 runs in 1/3 of an inning. The game was over by the end of the first. The Mets lost …

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After a season of incredible inconsistency marked by long winning streaks and long losing streaks and one of the most horrifically bad pitching staffs in the history of Major League Baseball, my beloved Philadelphia Phillies have pulled into a dead heat with the New York Mets after the Mets have pulled off one of the most monumental collapses in the history of the game. After a huge win that eliminated Atlanta from the playoff hunt, the Phillies are now tied for first place in the National League East.

The Mets had a seven game lead with 17 to play, and they’ve blown that lead entirely, thanks, in no small part, to eight straight losses to the Phightin’ Phils.

The Phillies, …

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I belong to a professional networking group that has been an excellent source of both new friends and good business referrals. Unlike many tip groups, our group follows a formal meeting agenda, has officers, and committee chairs, and the like. We meet for an hour and fifteen minutes each week. Each week, a member of the group has half an hour to present about his or her business, or some aspect of that business, so that other members can get a better understanding of what services are provided and how to refer business.

My turn to present was at Tuesday’s meeting. So, I gave a half hour talk on real property law in Ohio, and, in particular, how to convey …

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Maj. Gen. William Farrar “Baldy” Smith is an interesting fellow. I’ve learned to appreciate just how interesting a fellow he is from my work on the emergency militia forces that gathered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to defend the Keystone State against the Confederate invasion in 1863. I had never looked at any of what I’m about to discuss until a couple of weeks ago, when I decided that one of the things that I wanted to focus on in the book on the retreat from Gettysburg was the role played by Smith’s command, which has never been given any sort of a detailed treatment anywhere. Consequently, I immersed myself into this, and boy, did I find some interesting stuff when I …

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Hat tip to Brian Downey, whose post about this blog brought it to my attention. Good catch, Brian.

Mike, a substitute teacher from the Toledo area, has an excellent blog called Madness Mike that actually began in July. There is quite a bit of really good content on this blog already, and I’m adding it to my blogroll. Frankly, I’m not sure how this one managed to slip by all of us, but I’m glad Brian found it.

Check it out.

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On September 23, 2005, I made my first post on this blog, dipping my toe into the blogging pool for the first time. Two years and 539 posts later, I’m still standing. It’s been a real labor of love, and I’ve enjoyed every minute.

Any number of Civil War blogs have come and gone since that time, some memorable, and some definitely not. I’ve published several books in that time, and I’ve seen the culmination of a couple of projects that I’ve been working on for 15 years or more. I’ve seen changes in the book publishing industry, and I’ve seen a sea change in the availability of primary source resources on the Internet. You’ve been along with Susan and …

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