Civil War Talk Radio episodes have been archived

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.