Well, we’re home. It’s been another very long day of driving that included a brief (90 minute) detour to and stop in Gettysburg today so I could see about acquiring a few more primary sources for the retreat manuscript (I bought 8 books that represent primary source material that will help to flesh out the story even more).

Okay, here’s the latest on my dad. We didn’t get to see him on Thursday night, as we got in too late. Traffic was horrific on the trip, and it rained like hell the whole way. What is normally a 7 hour drive was nearly 9 as a result. So, we got there too late to see him.

Friday morning, Susan and I surprised him at breakfast. He’s come a tremendously long way. His speech is clearer (when he’s not exhausted), and he was glad to see us. We went and got him a birthday cake, and came back later for a birthday celebration. We watched him go through his occupational therapy, and I was thrilled to see him walking, both with and without the walker. Considering that I fully expected him to be wheelchair bound for the rest of his life, you can imagine how thrilling it was to see that. In short, he will not have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Susan and I then went and got him dinner at his favorite restaurant and carried it in to him as a special birthday treat. He went through those ribs like Sherman went through Georgia. 🙂

On Saturday, he was discharged from the hospital and transferred to a long-term rehab unit in a nursing home. Although he was very tired when we got there, he hadn’t been outdoors since the day before the stroke, and the weather was gorgeous–warm and sunny but not much humidity. So, we took him outside in his wheelchair and sat and enjoyed the day for a while. When I got him back into bed after that, he was snoring within three minutes. Poor guy was absolutely wiped out.

Today, we took him a television set from home before heading out of town, and he had gotten a good night’s sleep. Consequently, he was bright and cheerful and attentive when we got there, and his speech was pretty clear. I hated to leave, but we had no choice.

He’s come a tremendously long way in just five and a half weeks. I still don’t know whether he will ever be able to come home, but even if he can’t, he will be able to enjoy a pretty good quality of life, since he’s ambulatory again. I feel much better about things.

My mother is a challenge, but I won’t bore you with that. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of pressure on me. However, it’s great to see him coming along.

Back to the Civil War tomorrow……

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I realized that it’s been some time since I’ve given an update on my father. The stroke was five weeks ago today. Remember that when it happened, he was nearly completely paralyzed on the right side and really couldn’t speak very well at all.

Five weeks later, he’s gotten most of the movement back on the right side. He walked about fifty yards with a walker the other day and is making good and steady progress. He’s getting some of the dexterity back in his hand, and he got put back on a normal diet today. His speech is still garbled, but it’s better. About half of what he says is clear as a bell, and the other half is pretty much completely unintelligible. But, he’s now able to string several words together coherently. He’s desperate to go home, but we still don’t know whether he will ever be able to do so. On Saturday, he will be transferred from the rehab unit at the hospital, where he’s been for nearly a month, and will go to a rehab facility.

Friday is his 87th birthday. Susan and I are headed there tomorrow to celebrate it with him. We will be back on Sunday evening. If I have time, I will try to post something while we’re in Pennsylvania, but please don’t be surprised if I’m not able to do so until we get back.

The prayers and good wishes of all of you undoubtedly helped. We’re all touched by it. Thank you.

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My concerns about the future of Civil War Times magazine have been largely alleviated. Dana Shoaf, who’s been the editor of America’s Civil War for the last several years, has been named as the new editor of CWTI. I know Dana; I’ve done some battlefield stomping with him. I’ve also worked with him in his capacity as editor of ACW and know him to be a real pro. The magazine is in good hands.

That, however, creates an altogether new problem, which is finding a new editor for ACW. Hopefully, someone as talented as Dana will be located and will step up to the plate.

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This morning, I got an e-mail from old pal Drew Wagenhoffer congratulating me on making Civil War Interactive’s list of the top twenty Civil War sites. I thanked Drew, but I had no idea what he was talking about.

I then went to CWI to see what he meant, and boy, was I blown away.

Every year, CWI runs a poll of its readers to determine the top twenty Civil War sites on the Internet. Nearly 500 people voted, and I was absolutely flabbergasted to find that this humble little blog of mine placed number 14 on that list. I started this on a whim, and it’s taken on a life of its own.

Until I saw that list, I never realized that this blog has affected so many people’s lives or that so many people take time out of their busy days to visit this site and indulge my rantings. I’m just blown away and don’t really know what to say. I’m humbled and I’m grateful, and I hope that I continue to entertain and interest you and that you will continue to spend a few minutes of your day visiting this site.

To everyone who reads this blog, and to everyone who voted for this site, I am eternally grateful. Thank you.

Congratulations are in order to all of the others who made the list. I especially want to say congratulations to Dimitri Rotov and Mannie Gentile, who also made the list. A special congratulations goes to old friend Dick “Shotgun” Weeks, whose incredible site richly deserves its number one ranking. Congratulations, Dick.

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Earlier today, I posted the following on the forum boards at Armchair General:

I have heard the bad news about Chris Lewis leaving. Having worked with Chris on my lead article this past winter, I know that he is a capable, talented professional who cares a great deal about the magazine and about maintaining its quality and integrity. Hence, while I was disappointed to hear of his leaving, I know it’s in keeping with his character. I respect a man who’s willing to go to bat for his principles.

Eric

To his credit, Eric Weider responded to me. Here’s his response:

Eric I appreciate your feedback.

In any event…I always welcome feedback. It is sincerely appreciated.

I have nothing further to say about this, other than to say that I hope that Eric is right. And in any event, I wish Chris Lewis nothing but the best.

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I’ve had some opportunities to interact with Chris Lewis during his tenure as the editor of Civil War Times Illustrated. Chris published JD’s and my article on the charges at Fairfax Court Huse and Westminster in this year’s first issue, and we enjoyed working with him on the project. We were very pleased with the way that the article came out, and with the fact that it was chosen as the cover story for that issue.

Last week, Dimitri Rotov posted that Chris has resigned as editor. Chris circulated an e-mail announcing his resignation that included the following passage:

Naturally this is not an easy decision for me to make. As many of you know, I am a lifelong reader and care a great deal about this publication—which is why I cannot be a part of the “new direction” that the magazines in thisgroup are either already going in, or will be going in soon. There is no respect here anymore for history, historians or the core audience. I want to thank all of you for your support ofthe magazine over the last couple years.

I will miss Chris, as I think he’s done a fine job.

CWTI and America’s Civil War are part of the Weider History Group. Previously, these magazines were owned and operated by Cowles, but they were all sold to a company owned and operated by Eric Weider. Eric’s family has long been in the physical fitness business, and they made a fortune in that industry. They decide to foray into the realm of history because Eric also publishes Armchair General magazine, which is oriented toward military gamers. There are forum boards on the Armchair General site, and I post there occasionally. Consequently, I’ve been closely following the threads discussing the changes to Military History magazine, most of which have been extremely negative.

Tonight, Dimitri has added an open letter to Eric Weider on his blog. Dimitri raises some interesting points, and I agree with most of them. However, I definitely disagree with him on one of his major suggestions. He wrote, “Relying on freelancers for articles has long put your magazines at a quality disadvantage; it is better to hire a small but reliable staff who can produce to a standard you set and deliver that consistently. Booking articles from name authors to supplement freelance work is also very dangerous, for unless those authors are closely supervised, they will hand you their bottom drawer leftovers (see especially Geoff Norman’s piece on ‘surrender monkeys’ in the current Military History and William Marvel’s article on ‘McClellan apologists’ in the current America’s Civil War).”

I think that this is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. First, and foremost, people have areas of expertise, and hiring a staff of generalists will mean that experts will no longer participate. Second, if the same writers do every article for every issue, the writing will become stale and will be too standardized. It is, of course, an old cliche that variety is the spice of life. However, I really believe that maintaining variety in the types of articles and the authors who write them is critical to the future of the publication. While I understand Dimitri’s point, I think it’s a bad idea.

In any event, I do hope that Eric Weider takes the criticisms of his readers and the radical step of resigning by Chris Lewis (who was there less than a year, if I recall correctly) to heart. I certainly hope that these publications can be turned around and restored to their prior level of quality, or else they will wither and die. I would hate to see that happen.

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I’ve made my opposition to Google’s plan to scan materials that are still covered by copyright and make them available on the Internet well known. I’ve ranted about it extensively here at length and won’t beat that poor dead horse any more.

At the same time, each time I’ve addressed this question, I’ve said that I think that the scanning of public domain works is not only appropriate but an admirable and worthy project that I wholeheartedly support, largely because nobody’s copyright rights are being trampled. After the past couple of weeks, I feel even more strongly about the subject.

When we decided to beef up our study of the retreat from Gettysburg to make it a more scholarly work than its original incarnation was, I spent a lot of time on the on-line book archive sites, searching for Union and Confederate regimental histories and published memoirs and the like. I own copies of virtually every published cavalry regimental history, but only a handful of infantry regimentals. Consequently, I hit the on-line archive sites hard.

I ended up downloading nearly 40 full books in the public domain in PDF form, burning them to a CD-ROM, and then bringing them into the office so I could print out the pertinent portions of them for use in the book. Wow….talk about some finds. Some of the material that I got that way is really remarkable stuff, in very rare regimental histories. I’m nearly done plugging this material into the manuscript, and let me tell you, it’s made a huge difference in the overall tactical detail and overall quality of the book. When it comes to the public domain materials, I am a true believer.

There are three different sites where one can find a lot of this good material in PDF form. First, of course, is the Google book search site. Enter your search command, and when the results come up, be sure to click on “full view”, which will provide access to the complete text of these public domain works.

I also made very extensive use of the Internet Archive site, which is really a portal that collects these scanned materials and provides access to them. The selection of available public domain materials on this site is much more extensive than Google’s. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about it until I was well into the process. I ended up using the Internet Archive more than any other resource.

The third major resource is the one I used the least. It’s in part because, as a Mac user, I have a pathological hatred of all things Microsoft, which I view as the Evil Empire. Given a choice between using a Microsoft product and ANYTHING else, I will almost always use the alternative (I use Eudora for e-mail at work because I hate Outlook, and I’m a long-time Firefox user, as just two examples). It’s also because the site is buggy and doesn’t always work smoothly, and it won’t work at all on a Mac. However, the Microsoft live book search site is a useful tool (if you can get it to work), as it provides a portal to pretty much all of the digitized material available in various repositories around the Internet. It was my last resort, used to make certain I hadn’t missed anything on the other sites.

There are some other sites with much smaller databases, but you can pretty much access them by using these three sites. Having access to all of those public domain regimental histories and memoirs in one place that was relatively easy to use made the task of accumulating and incorporating this material into the manuscript quickly and painlessly possible. Thus, while I remain intransigent in my opposition to Google’s attacks on my copyright rights, I remain a true believer in the value of making public domain materials readily available for use by the consuming public that might not otherwise have access to those materials.

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Historian Paul Taylor has entered the blogging fray. Paul has launched a new blog called “With Sword and Pen”, which he describes as “A Celebration of First Edition and Collectible Books Pertaining to ‘The Late Unpleasantness'”. Imagine a site like Drew Wagenhoffer’s, only dedicated to first editions of books, including those long out of print, and you get the idea.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Paul, and good luck. I’ve added a link.

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The new issue of Blue & Gray magazine arrived today. There’s an article by J.D. and me on Stuart’s shelling of Carlisle in the issue, as well as an extremely truncated version of our response to Andrea Custer. Dave Roth, the publisher, only allowed us 2,000 words, with 1,000 words as to why she was wrong and 1,000 words as to why we’re right. Our original response was 5,500 words long, so what was published is nothing remotely close to what we originally wrote.

J. D. is going to be putting a rebuttal to her response on his blog, so keep an eye out for that if this topic is of interest to you. Frankly, I thought her response was long on patting herself on the back and very short on substance, but that’s just my opinion.

Consequently, we decided that once the issue was out, we would publish the full 5,500 word version here. I’ve added it as a page and not as a post. It can be found here.

Enjoy.

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In working on completing the retreat manuscript, I spent much of the afternoon looking at newspaper coverage of the pertinent time frame. Many of the articles came from The New York Times, but several also came from other papers, such as the Baltimore Daily Gazette. Since there was nothing like e-mail or the Internet in those days, most articles had to be mailed in or delivered by courier; some shorter articles could be transmitted by telegraph. Either way, it usually took at least several days for a piece to appear in the newspaper, and by the time that they did, events had already demonstrated that many of the reports were inaccurate.

Also due to the difficulty in communicating, virtually any rumor that was even remotely credible got published. Thus, one must parse through the newspaper coverage very carefully and with a fine-toothed comb, as these newspaper accounts are just filled with inaccurate information. As historians, we have the responsibility to see that the true facts are presented, so I take the responsibility of parsing out this material quite seriously.

Another phenomenon interests me. Often, the newspapers simply ran stories from other papers verbatim, with attribution to the other paper. As just one example, there were a number of stories from the Philadelphia Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer repeated in the Baltimore newspaper without comment or any indication that anything had been done to determine the validity or accuracy of the stories being recounted. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and it means that the job of parsing often goes two levels deep.

Many papers had dedicated correspondents that traveled with specific commands. A correspondent of the New York Times named E. A. Paul often traveled with the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps, and spent most of the retreat attached to the Michigan Cavalry Brigade of Kilpatrick’s Third Division. It’s akin to what the modern media calls “imbedded journalists” today. While there’s a great bit of detail reported by Paul, the scope is narrow. It’s a real trade-off. Finding complete coverage is, therefore, a challenge. Some Union officers, such as John Buford, Wesley Merritt, and David Gregg, were not fond at all of the media and forbade reporters from accompanying their commands in the field. Therefore, officers such as Judson Kilpatrick used the media to promote himself and advance his own career. It’s somewhat comforting to know that some things never change…..

The final issue is reading microfilm and photocopies. I’ve always despised microfilm–reading it gives me hellacious headaches–so I tend to print stuff out. The problem is that the print-outs are small, and for old eyes like mine, there’s no way I can even think about trying to read this stuff without reading glasses any more.

In spite of it all, newspapers are some of my favorite sources. Some of the very best and most valuable material that we found for Plenty of Blame to Go Around came from newspapers, and including that material really helped to put a lot of very valuable flesh on the bones of the story. I would never feel like my job of researching a project is complete without having thoroughly combing the newspaper sources. I guess I will just have to invest in more powerful reading glasses……

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