I’ve had four books published by university presses. Three were published by Kent State, and one by LSU. Consequently, I feel qualified to share a few thoughts.

The advantage of a university press is that they don’t have to make a profit. This means that they have the luxury of being able to publish things that most commercial publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Some of these books are very good. Many of them are books that nobody in their right mind would ever consider reading. Many university presses publish stuff that’s written by professors for professors, and those professors are the only ones who will ever read the books. Clearly, there’s a niche in the marketplace for that.…

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Well, I’ve been a dedicated hockey fan for more than 30 years. One can’t have grown up in Philadelphia in the ’70’s and not be a hockey fan. Susan and I have been going to hockey games together for about ten years, and I’ve been to a lot of games in my life, NHL and minor league.

Tonight, I saw something I have never seen before. And that takes some doing.

Nashville came in 8-0. The Blue Jackets played very hard tonight and got some superb goaltending from Martin Prusek. The Jackets led 2-1 with less than a minute to go in the game. However, when a bad penalty was called on one of the Jackets, Nashville scored the tying …

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Sorry I’ve been quiet. I’ve been blasting through the page galleys of my new book, which is just about ready to go to the printer. I finished them tonight, and expect to resume ranting tomorrow night, after watching the sorry Columbus Blue Jackets lose again.

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Dimitri Rotov has a very interesting post on his blog today. It got me thinking about a subject that bothers me a great deal.

I’ve always viewed part of my role as a responsible historian as mythbusting, not the perpetuation of those myths. The self-perpetuating myth that inevitably annoys me to no end is the one that says that Brig. Gen. John Buford’s successful stand at Gettysburg on July 1 was the result of the superior firepower of the Spencer carbines carried by his men. Never mind that the Spencer carbine didn’t go into mass production until September 1, 1863 and that only about five prototypes of it existed as of July 1, 1863. Never mind that of the 92% …

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Here are a few more things that really irk me.

1. There are a handful of historians out there who have, through their past works, built up a fair amount of credibility. They have, however, badly diluted their reputations and the value of their endorsements by being promiscuous about doing so. Here’s the best example–and I know that I keep coming back to the Carhart book, but it’s one of the most egregious examples of being a really atrocious book I’ve seen in a very, very long time–Carhart was a former student of James M. McPherson. Consequently, McPherson gave the book a glowing and ringing endorsement. That the likes of a Pulitzer Prize winner put his imprimatur on the book …

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Alice Gayley was kind enough to pass on an excellent piece from today’s Washington Post that spells out my position on the issue of Google’s scheme of massive copyright infringement better than I can.

This is, by the way, precisely the same argument that the musicians used in objecting to the Napster concept. And, as I have pointed our repeatedly, what Google proposes here is, in my humble opinion, a copyright infringement scheme on a scale more massive–and infinitely more egregious–than Napster, because a corporate giant is perpetrating it, not a bunch of college kids looking to download a few free songs.

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Time for a rant. This one has been brewing all day.

Here are a few random gripes, presented in no particular order. All of these are things that I hate about Civil War books.

1. Books that do not have bibliographies. See Tom Carhart. This permits authors to cut corners, big time. It also allows them to avoid being held accountable for the quality and quantity of their research.

2. Books that do not have maps. If you ever want to go nuts, try to read a history of a complex battle without any decent maps. Not including maps is corner cutting of the worst variety.

3. Books endorsed by people who obviously haven’t read them. One very prominent historian …

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Well, now a publisher’s trade association has joined the fray in the fight against Google’s massive copyright infringement scheme. The Association of American Publishers’s press release states, quite correctly, that “the bottom line is that under its current plan, Google is seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers.”

This new lawsuit joins the suit filed by the Author’s Guild last month. The press release issued when the Author’s Guild suit was filed said, “This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law. It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will …

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I am not a professional historian. In fact, I have never had a formal history class after tenth grade. With two majors and a minor, I didn’t have time to take any history classes in college. This means that I am entirely self-taught.

The fact that I am self-taught is actually a bit of a mixed blessing. On one hand, my mind is not cluttered with theory, and I have the ability to only focus on those things that interest me. On the other hand, it means that I have no formalized approach to the researching and writing of history. I am free to pick and choose what I want to work on, but it means that I am viewed …

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I’ve been thinking about Carhart’s book again, and about a comment that came in. That comment suggests that although Carhart claims loudly that he’s espousing some novel theory, the historical record plainly demonstrates that others have already tread the same water on a number of prior occasions. That is intellectual dishonesty at best, and consumer fraud at worst.

What bothers me is that people do derivative works without acknowledging that that’s what they are, and without ackowledging that they’re borrowing ideas from others. There has been so much written about the Battle of Gettysburg that apparently the only way to make a splash is to re-package someone else’s work, jazz it up, and try to sell it as such. As …

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