Intellectual property lawyer Larry Ebert put up a very interesting perspective on Carhart’s crappy book on his blog yesterday. I commend it to you.

Ebert discusses yet another review of this lousy book that points out just how little there really was in terms of novel content. It also points out how poor and how shallow Carhart’s research really was.

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Fifteen years ago today, Susan and I were married. It hardly seems possible that so much time could have passed in what seems like the blink of an eye, but it certainly has.

Thanks for the fifteen best years of my life to my best friend and favorite companion. Here’s to many more to come.

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I got to Gettysburg at 1:00 on Friday afternoon. I hooked up with pal Dwayne Siskey, and we met Dave Roth, the publisher of Blue & Gray magazine at the visitor’s center. We loaded into Dave’s truck and headed down to the south end of the field, so I could show Dave the traditional interpretation of Farnsworth’s Charge. Dave shot a bunch of photos for it and some in the Wheatfield for another article, and we then headed up to Carlisle. We shot some photos for my piece on Stuart’s shelling of Carlisle, including a couple at my alma mater, Dickinson College. We also found a house just behind the campus that was struck by one of Breathed’s shells. …

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I left Columbus at 7:00 on Friday morning. I got home after ten p.m. tonight. I’ve done more than 7.5 hours of driving today, and I’m beat. I will post about the weekend tomorrow night, including a terrific photo of four bloggers together (Dimitri Rotov, Mannie Gentile, JD, and me). Dimitri has already posted about it, but I will put my two cents’ worth (plus the photos) in tomorrow night when I’m not quite so exhausted.

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Earlier this year, I made a conscious decision to try to cut back on my Civil War related travel some. Much as I love it, too often I don’t get paid for it, and being self-employed, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. It’s pretty much that simple. Once Susan got laid off in February, I figured that I had better cut back in order to make sure that I’m maximizing my billable hours and maintaining cash flow. Consequently, I only committed to three out of town events for the entire summer. Two of them happen to be on back-to-back weekends, and the third one is during the third week in August.

The second event is a book signing …

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These are most of the photos that I took in Virginia last weekend. There are a few more, but these are definitely the best of the lot. They appear pretty much in chronological order.

This is the United Daughters of the Confederacy monument to Brig. Gen. Turner Ashby. It sits on the spot where Ashby was killed, which is just outside Harrisonburg. It sits in a remote, tiny park run by the UDC. JMU is building athletic fields right next to it, so it remains to be seen how those fields will impact this handsome monument.

These two signs sit about twenty yards from the Ashby monument.

This is the UDC monument to the Battle of Cross Keys. There are …

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After six very long hours of driving, I’m home. It was well into the 90’s all day as I was driving, which just adds to the fatigue. We will post photos from the trip tomorrow night.

There’s a very good, authentic New York-style bagel place across the street from the hotel where I stayed in Harrisonburg. I had breakfast there all three mornings I was in Harrisonburg. This morning, I had my breakfast and lingered for a few moments to finish reading the USA Today. When I finished the paper, I got up to leave. After busing my tray, I noticed a fellow wearing a t-shirt from the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation, so I jokingly said, “Nice shirt.”

The …

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To say the least, it’s been a LONG weekend.

Here’s what the last two days have entailed. We will get some photos posted over the next couple of days, once I get home.

The bus picked us up at 7:45 AM yesterday morning. We headed out to the Wilderness. It’s a little over two hours from Harrisonburg to the Wilderness. The ride went quickly. Gordon Rhea did a lot of introduction to the campaign and I did a little on the cavalry.

We got to the Wilderness and unloaded. We walked the Saunders Field fights and then headed back out. Since we were tight on time, we drove from there down to the Widow Tapp Farm, site of the famous …

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As I said earlier today, I’m here for the annual conference of the Shenandoah Civil War Associates. The program is administered through James Madison University and based there. I drove in yesterday, a lovely 7 hour drive through BFE in West Virginia. Last night we had a board meeting to plan next year’s program (which will be April 1-9, 1865) and an absolutely incredible meal.

This year’s program is the Overland Campaign of 1864. Faculty for the symposium are Gordon Rhea, Jeff Wert, Robert E. L. Krick (also known as Krick the Younger) and yours truly. Today was a partial day, mostly to introduce the campaign. Tomorrow and Sunday are battlefield stomping days. Tomorrow, we cover the Wilderness …

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Greetings from Harrisonburg, Virginia. I am here for the annual conference of The Shenandoah Civil War Associates (more on that later). I had hoped to make this post last night, but the drive here was exhausting and then I had an Associates’ board meeting last night. By the time I got back from that, it was nearly 11:00 and I was way too tired to think coherently.

Some of you may have noticed that my last post has been deleted. While I don’t regret that the post is gone, I do regret that the wonderful comments that it spurred are. Those very useful and well-considered comments, from the likes of Ken Noe and Lanny Tanton, got me thinking, and I …

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