26 May 2011 by Published in: General News 6 comments

The other day, I got an e-mail from Mark Gaffney, who is the owner and webmaster of a very useful web site called Impediments of War. The site was designed to be, and acts as, the archive for all of the episodes of Civil War Talk Radio, a weekly program hosted by Prof. Gerry Prokopowicz, the chairman of the history department at East Carolina University.

This is the e-mail that Mark sent me:

My website is titled Impediments of War and is intended to be a Companion Website to Civil War Talk Radio. My inspiration was Dyer’s Compendium, I originally had the website subtitled “A Compendium of Civil War Talk Radio,” but decided it was a big mouthful….Companion is easier for most people to say and understand. I started the website in November 2010.

Additional background information can be found on the website HomePage and on the About Our Site page.

As you may, or may not know, World Talk Radio owns the Civil War Talk Radio shows. Gerry is merely a volunteer who is willing to provide his services each week as a labor of love. World Talk Radio does not offer Gerry much in the way of support and their website is atrocious. I started the website out of frustration with World Talk’s site. I believe in the show so much that I was willing to put up money to spread the word (Sounds like that old Remington Shaver commercial from the 70’s!). I taught myself HTML, PHP and MySQL while creating the site. To my good fortune, Gerry liked the website so much that he adopted it as the “official” website. He mentions it at the beginning of each show.

My website provides the information on each show and links to the original MP3 files on the World Talk Servers. There are currently 200+ hours of interviews online. The show listings are organized by season, the 100 series being the first year and the 700 series being the 7th year, etc. I also have a listing of guests, alphabetical by last name and recently added a “search” tool that is still being tweaked.

I am not in the Military History business nor am I a web designer, I am a structural engineer who practices in New Jersey, consulting to architects to make sure their buildings stand up. I maintain the website as a hobby. Through Gerry’s show, I have widened my appreciation of the Civil War and discover so much valuable information. I think that is worth sharing with others.

I was interviewed on Gerry’s show during the program’s episode 129, in case anyone is interested. Like the others, this episode is archived on Mark’s website.

Thanks, Mark–both for writing and for your obvious labor of love that does a service for all of us. Mark’s doing a great job with this project, and I commend his site to anyone with an interest in listening to any of the terrific interviews that Gerry Prokopowicz has done over the years.

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Comments

  1. Thu 26th May 2011 at 11:24 pm

    The website is terrific, as you point out Eric. I was pleased with how much prep work Gerry put into getting ready for my interview on CW Talk Radio earlier this year. The man sure reads a lot of books!

  2. Dennis
    Fri 27th May 2011 at 5:21 am

    Thanks Eric! I will get to the site ASAP!

    Regards,
    Dennis

  3. John Murphy
    Fri 27th May 2011 at 1:52 pm

    This is good news. I love CW talk radio podcasts but have been disapointed that I could only download the first segment from the World Talk Radio site.

  4. Chris Evans
    Fri 27th May 2011 at 3:39 pm

    Great news. The shows use to be accessible in a decent fashion on World Talk Radio’s site and then they completely jumbled it up. This is a very worthy project.
    Chris

  5. Thu 14th Jul 2011 at 11:30 pm

    CW Talk Radio is excellent, Jerry P. was the historian at the now closed Abraham Lincoln Museum for 9+ years and is a font on knowledge. Anyone interested in Mr. Lincoln should read Jerry’s book “Did Lincoln Own Slaves?’ It contains Q & A he received and gave out to visitors at the Museum. It is good to get right with Lincoln and to get Lincoln right.

  6. Thu 18th Aug 2011 at 3:09 pm

    For anybody interested, Civil War Talk Radio is now available via iTunes and Zune.
    iTunes allows for automatic downloading whenever a new show is added.

    Season 8 is scheduled to start September 2, 2011. Scheduled guests for the beginning of Season 8 can be found at our website http://www.impedimentsofwar.org.

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