Dimitri Rotov’s Blog

Dimitri Rotov has a fabulous post on his blog today about Ethan Rafuse’s treatment of the crisis of command that occurred between September 1-5, 1862. In an extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of Ethan’s discussion of these events, Dimitri has done much to educate me. This is a period that is of interest to me, but at the same time, it’s always been tangential to my work, so I’ve not gone into a great deal of detail in examining it. In reading Dimitri’s post today, I’ve learned a great deal in the process.

What I like about Dimtri’s approach here is that he’s very methodical and very analytical, giving credit where Ethan got something right, and pointing out where got something wrong. It’s the same sort of scholarly approach that I tried to use when I did the critical analysis of Tom Carhart’s festering pile of crap in one of my first entries on this blog. Like Dimitri, I tried to use a detailed, scholarly analysis to show where all of the problems were with the book and to show where it was wrong. The difference, of course, is that Dimitri found a lot of merit in Ethan’s work, whereas I found none at all in Carhart’s.

Simply shredding something for the sake of shredding is fine. It obviously has more credibility if you have the horsepower to back it up, and that’s how I’ve tried to approach critiquing the work of others.

Kudos to Dimitri for a really outstanding post.