I’ve become a huge fan of Roger Hunt’s work. Roger is one of the most diligent and effective researchers out there. To date, Roger has published three of the most useful books in my reference library. I discussed these books in detail in a lengthy post back in January.

Of special interest is Roger’s series of books profiling Union colonels. To date, two volumes in the series have been published. One book covers just New York. The other covers the New England states. I’ve been referring to them regularly during the writing of our study of the retreat from Gettysburg, and the photos found in these books are also very useful. Other than that the prior publisher had priced them excessively, I can’t say enough good things about these two books. Unfortunately, the prior publisher decided that the books didn’t sell enough copies, and elected to discontinue publishing the series.

I heard some great news the other day.

The newest volume in the series will be published by Stackpole on October 10. Unlike its predecessors, this book is very reasonably priced at $29.95. It covers the Mid-Atlantic states, meaning that it addresses the colonels from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Fortunately, it will be published in the same 8 1/2 x 11 format as the first two books in the series, and I likewise hope that Stackpole will continue with the high grade, glossy Baxter paper used by the prior publisher.

I’ve been waiting for this book since the New York volume was published in 2003. I’m really looking forward to seeing the new volume.

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WordPress tells me whenever somebody links to my blog. Today, one popped up for a blog I’d never heard of, called Mounted Valor, a name I did not recognize. So, I went and checked it out.

It turns out to be Chris Swift’s new blog, which, unlike his old blog, deals only with Civil War cavalry. I have changed the link in the blogroll, which was to his old blog, Yankee Tirade. That link is dead, and I was planning on deleting it this weekend. I’m glad to see that Chris is back and resuming his studies of Civil War cavalry. Welcome back, Chris.

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I am in Leesburg, Virginia on business today and part of tomorrow. Consequently, I got together with fellow blogger Dimitri Rotov for dinner this evening in downtown Leesburg. We ate at a very interesting place suggested by Dimitri. It’s called The Green Tree, and it features menu items based on 18th Century recipes.

The meal was excellent, the wine dry and fruity, and the dinner conversation delightful. If you’re ever going to be in the area, be sure to look Dimitri up. He makes for an excellent dinner companion.

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Sean Dail’s comment to last night’s post got me thinking about the whole concept of speaking to promote one’s books concept of marketing. I’ve done a tremendous amount of this over the course of the last ten years. I’ve always taken the attitude that when I speak, I have a room full of potential book buyers in front of me. Sometimes, people do buy, but more often than not, they don’t. Some groups are better about it than others, and some are downright terrible about it.

I rarely charge other than some travel money for speaking engagements for this reason. Don’t get me wrong–if it’s part of a commercial enterprise, then I fully expect to get my fair share of the pie. Conferences usually pay pretty well, which is why I readily accept invitations to participate in them. However, the overwhelming majority of Civil War Roundtables can’t afford to pay stipends, and most don’t. Most will cover travel expenses, but there are even a handful that won’t do that. Virtually all will offer the opportunity to sell books.

Over the course of the past ten years, I’ve easily spoken to 40 or 50 Roundtables around the country, some more than once. It’s enabled me to visit places I might not otherwise have gotten to see, such as my trip to New Orleans and Austin this past spring. More often than not, it wears me out. The travel is tiring, and so is the actual act of speaking. I rarely sell more than half a dozen or so books, so it’s questionable whether there’s enough of a financial reward to make it worth the while. To be honest, after nearly fifteen years of doing it regularly (literally hundreds of times), I’m beginning to grow a bit weary of the whole thing. I still enjoy the interaction with the public, but one can only get so excited about doing the same talk for the 100th time.

Stephen W. Sears does not accept speaking engagements at all. He calls it the “cannonball circuit.” I first heard that Steve doesn’t do speaking engagements in 1990 or so when I was the program chairman of our Civil War Roundtable and contacted him to invite him to speak. He has never elaborated for me the reasons why he chooses not to do speaking engagements, and I’ve never asked. I always figured that if he wanted me to know, he would have told me.

Likewise, I know that Bill Frassanito has stopped doing speaking engagements. Bill told me that in person the last time that I was in Gettysburg. Bill would prefer to sit down with his legion of fans at the Reliance Mine Saloon and enjoy an adult beverage or two, in an effort to engage in some direct sales techniques.

I am also aware that some of the academic historians who make up the core of the Civil Warriors blog have a very different philosophy about this. Brooks Simpson spelled it out well in this post.

First, I’m not a traveling bookstore. I’ve never carried with me books to sign. There are plenty of ways to obtain my writings, and frankly I think it’s somewhat embarrassing, even humiliating, to assume we are there to peddle our wares. If I want to publicize something, there are far more effective ways to reach a far larger audience.

Fourth, although many people are very appreciative and kind, I do detect in a few members of the audience some of the traits Mark has highlighted. I don’t think a CWRT or any other group is doing me a professional favor by having me come and talk. Rather, what I’m doing is a professional courtesy. I am very surprised when people in other white collar professions treat me in ways they would not be treated, and expect me to give away for free knowledge and insight for which they would charge … and then assume that I should be grateful for that opportunity. What makes that even more amusing is to hear mumblings afterward that some people ascribe to me behavior they exhibited in my presence: some folks actually like to demean what I do by saying, “that’s your opinion,” “I know better,” or whatever. I don’t think they would take that so kindly if they were the “expert” being consulted; if you are going to treat me that way, then why have me come in the first place, and why do you show up? This said, these encounters with smugness and condescension are the exception, not the rule, in my experience. Then again, I’ve never spoken before some of the groups Mark and Kevin Levin have mentioned.

Mark Grimsley makes similar points. There is a great deal of validity to what they both say.

To be honest, I’m beginning to re-think the whole strategy of promoting my books through speaking to Civil War Roundtables. Each trip keeps me from doing client work that I get paid to do, and each trip prevents me from working on my various research projects and the like. I’m just not sure how many more Roundtable talks I’m going to agree to do that require me to travel more than an hour or two for these reasons.

Let me throw it open to you, my readers. What do you all think about this issue? Please feel free to speak freely; nobody is being graded on this, and it helps me to make some important decisions.

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Every March, Liberty University, located in Lynchburg, Virginia, has a Civil War conference that was apparently started by Rev. Jerry Falwell himself, who evidently had an interest in the Late Unpleasantness.

Now, it bears noting that Liberty is a Southern Baptist university with a religious orientation, and it is also intensely conservative, in keeping with the religious and political philosophy of its founder, Reverend Falwell. Let’s also keep in mind that I’m a Jewish lawyer and liberal Democrat from Philadelphia. In short, I am the anti-Falwell.

Today, upon the recommendation of Stephen W. Sears, I was invited to be one of the presenters at next spring’s conference at Liberty, which will feature the Gettysburg Campaign. So far, Kent Masterson Brown is confirmed, as is Prof. Steve Woodworth, who is one of the contributors to the excellent Civil Warriors group blog. I also told the conference director that I would assist him in locating additional speakers to fill out the program.

I’m going to do my Stuart’s Ride talk, I think–I was given cavalry operations as the topic, and I’m inclined to limit it to the Stuart’s Ride topic. Most of all, I am known as as an authority on the Gettysburg Campaign, so I guess it is appropriate for me to participate in this conference.

At the same time, given my political proclivities and my religious background, this should make for a very interesting experience. Hopefully, no bolts of lightning will strike me while I’m there…..

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I saw something this evening that I never thought I would ever see again. I saw my father walk, without the assitance of either a walker or a cane. And I saw him walk remarkably well, considering that it’s only been nine weeks and the severity of the stroke. He’s a testament to resiliency and hard work.

His speech is still garbled, and he’s suffering from global aphasia, and I doubt it will ever be completely clear again as a result. However, I can understand the majority of what he says, and can guess at most of it from context.

All things considered, it could have been much, much worse, and it did my soul a lot of good to see him up and walking on his own without any assistance.

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After being gone for too long, Brett Schulte’s back. And he’s back with a great idea. Brett has asked me, as well as several others, to participate in his new group blog, TOCWOC, which stands for The Order of Civil War Obsessively Compulsed – Amateurs with Attitude!

Fear not. The vast majority of my rantings will continue to occur here. This will always be my home, although I may cross-post some things from time to time. I also may post there exclusively from time to time, but that’s a good thing. It gives all of you another blog to read. 🙂

I always really appreciated Brett’s insights, and was very sorry to see him stop blogging. I was very honored when he asked me to participate in his new blogging venture, and look forward to being part of the group.

As I said, this will always be my main blogging home, so fear not.

I’ve added a link to TOCWOC.

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I have a little bit of attention deficit disorder. It means that I tend to have a short attention span and that my mind often wonders unless I have something specific to focus on. I am able to focus to the point of exclusion of everything else when I need to do so, but I need a little bit of distraction to do so. That’s why I usually have the radio playing in my office during the day, since that little bit of distraction allows me to concentrate.

I had one of those moments today when I didn’t have anything specific to do and allowed my mind to wander a bit. Next thing I know, instead of thinking about my client’s lawsuit, which is probably what I SHOULD have been thinking about, I found myself instead thinking about how George Gordon Meade handled the pursuit of Lee’s army after Gettysburg (which has been a source of nearly constant thought and consideration over the past few weeks). Although it kept me from doing work that I probably should have been doing (and for which I would get paid), I found myself hashing things out in my mind yet again, and damn if I didn’t come up with a new twist today.

I’m not going to share it here, as I don’t want to steal my own thunder just yet, but suffice it to say that it is an insight that I have never had previously, and it’s worthy of discussing in the book. I just need to work on it some more, organize my thoughts, and then I will include it in the final chapter, which is where we present our analysis and conclusions.

It’s another example of me thinking too much. Often, that’s not a good thing. But this time, I think it was.

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My recent rant apparently rankled Marc Leepson, the author of a recent book on the Battle of Monocacy. Evidently, he tried to post a comment to my rant, and failed for whatever reason. Consequently, he tracked me down through my professional website and sent me an e-mail through the “contact me” feature.

So that nobody can accuse me of censorship of comments or of not permitting Mr. Leepson the opportunity to respond, here is the e-mail verbatim (although I have left out his telephone number and personal e-mail address, both of which the form requires):

Name : Marc Leepson
email : XXXXXXXXXX@aol.com
phone : (XXX) XXX-XXXX
comments : I tried submitting this as a post to your blog, but it seemed to be rejected.

Please think twice the next time when you make such harsh criticism. All of the reviews of the book have been extremely positive, from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly Book List, The Washington Post (by Jonathan Yardley), and the Richmond Times Dispatch. You can read the Yardley Review and the PW review in their entirety on the Amazon.com page for Desperate Engagement. The others are exceprted on my web site, www.marcleepson.com

I want to respond to several of the comments.

1. I have, indeed, read the book, just as I read everything that gets published on the Battle of Monocacy. As I have said here repeatedly, this is a subject of great interest to me, and I snap up everything about this battle I can get my hands on. What I did not do was spend a great deal of time going through the footnotes. Instead, I carefully went through the bibliography, and NONE of the sources that Mr. Leepson mentions in his e-mail were included in the bibliography. Why they weren’t included there is a complete mystery to me. I am, however, willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that his publisher made that ill-advised call, and not Mr. Leepson.

It also bears noting that I was referring to UNPUBLISHED manuscript material with respect to memoirs, diaries, and letters, not published sources. Just about all of the sources Mr. Leepson claimed that he used were published. Anyone can find the published materials. The trick–and the talent–is in finding the caches of unpublished material.

2. Sean Dail has already pointed out to me that I was wrong about the Bearss book not being mentioned (see the very first comment to my original post), and I acknowledge that error.

3. I believe that the rest of my critique remains valid and appropriate. The fact is that Mr. Leepson is not an authority on the Civil War, and does not have a solid grasp of either the tactics or the terrain. As an old friend of mine, who spent 26 years as a combat engineer in the U. S. Army, is very fond of saying, “the terrain is THE primary source.” No truer words have ever been spoken. One can only truly understand Civil War combat by spending the time on the terrain and letting it talk to you. You HAVE to understand both the tactics AND the terrain, and, with all due respect to Mr. Leepson, there simply is no way that he could have spent the necessary time on the terrain in three visits, most of which were evidently spent going through the park’s research files, to really understand either the terrain or the tactics. Over the years, I have visited this battlefield at least 15 times, and have had to figure out the terrain and tactics on my own, before there was interpretation available out there.

By contrast, I spent seven entire days on the battlefield at Trevilian before thinking about writing, and then made several more trips DURING the process of writing to make sure that I had the terrain correct. The same holds true of my Monroe’s Crossroads study.

4. The lack of a response to my criticism of the lack of good maps speaks volumes. Again, there is no way to do any sort of detailed tactical study of a major battle with three maps for a 250 page book. It simply can’t be done.

As pointed out in my original post, this book does have some real pluses. It’s very well written, as I would expect of a journalist. It likewise gives an excellent overview of things, and makes for a good introductory study of this important battle. However, as someone who is hardly a novice, I found it really lacking in the sort of depth that I would expect, and instead was disappointed by its cursory examination of these events.

In short, the door remains wide open for a detailed tactical study of this important battle. I understand that one of the park rangers at the Monocacy National Battlefield is working on just that, to be published by the park, so I guess I will just have to wait and see how that pans out.

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The other day, I received this e-mail from old friend Jim Morgan, who heads the battlefield guide program at the Ball’s Bluff battlefield in Leesburg, Virginia:

I’m delighted to announce that all the new, updated, and corrected historical markers are in.  The original 16 which, even if correct, were weathered and not looking very good, have been replaced with new ones, plus four completely new signs help tell the story even better. 

Jim Morgan

This is fabulous news. Having had Jim’s personal tour of the battlefield, I can tell you that nobody knows more about this important but extremely early battle than does Jim, and that these new markers are a tribute to his dedication.

Take him up on his offer of a tour. I promise that you will not be disappointed.

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