Civil Warriors

Next month Super Bowl XLIV will be played.  One of the bloggers here roots for the Philadelphia Eagles, while another has seen his New York Giants win three Super Bowls … at which point that other blogger decides it might have been better to take up the Pittsburgh Steelers by themselves, instead of rooting for both Pennsylvania-based NFL teams.  Too late.  I’ll say nothing about the third blogger, who roots for a team based in Washington with a rather tasteless nickname.  I think they should be called the Lobbyists.

This year, Super Bowl XLIV will take place while the 44th president is in office.  Coincidence?  Of course.  But it’s a heck of a good excuse for the following blog, which decides which would prevail in a head-to-head matchup: the president or the game.

As a boy, I rooted for both the Jets and the Giants, and I recall Super Bowl III rather well (it’s far more difficult nowadays to root for both New York teams in any sport, although that was not an impossible feat before the New York Islanders began to challenge the New York Rangers in the NHL … but I digress).  One of the hallmarks of rooting for the Jets was hating the Raiders.  So I’m glad to report that Ulysses S. Grant prevailed over Super Bowl XVIII, in which the Raiders destroyed Washington.  Had it been Mosby’s raiders, instead of Al Davis’s Raiders, Grant might have had a tougher time of it.  But the true clash of titans involves Super Bowl XVI versus Abraham Lincoln: you’ll have to read the blog (and use the archives link on its right margin) to learn the outcome of that matchup.  Finally, the Giants’ 20-19 victory in Super Bowl XXV over the Buffalo Bills prevails over the last Civil War veteran elected president, William McKinley, who was, ironically, shot in Buffalo.  Scott Norwood was not quite as accurate.

The Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point has posted its call for applications for the 2010 Summer Seminar on Military History. This three-week program brings together approximately two dozen junior scholars of military history (graduate students who have completed all but their dissertation are also eligible) at West Point to participate in a terrific program of seminars, lectures, and staff rides.

This is pretty much a mandatory experience for anyone who has aspirations as a military historian. When I did the program as a fellow in 1999, the guest lecturers included such great scholars as Fred Anderson, John Lynn, Don Higginbotham, William Skelton, Brian Linn, and Williamson Murray, while the staff rides were led by Carol Reardon (Gettysburg) and Mark (Antietam). On top of all the great stuff you get to do in the course of the program, participants receive a very generous stipend, as well as coverage of expenses. This year, it is scheduled to run 1-23 June.

Application packets consist of a completed application form, current curriculum vitae, a sample of academic writing, and a letter of recommendation. The deadline for applications is 1 February 2010. More information can be found here.

Was back in Virginia a few weeks ago helping Chris Stowe and the rest of the CGSC teaching team at Fort Lee on the third iteration of an Appomattox Staff Ride. In the time since the first iteration of the ride in April, Chris wisely adjusted the ride to start at Fort Gregg instead of Five Forks. This avoided the problem last time of spending a huge chunk of time (time management is always the biggest challenge on these rides) on the events of 1 April and the whole background and conduct of the Battle at Five Forks. Instead, we simply started out saying, “OK, it is the morning of 2 April, Five Forks has happened, what is the situation?” After discussing this and the events of 2 April that led up to the fight for Fort Gregg, the four groups (led respectively by Chris, Fort Lee team leader Bob Kennedy, Fort Belvoir’s Chris Keller, and myself) did stands at Sutherland Station, Amelia Court House, Hillsman House, Kershaw Ridge, Cumberland Church, Final Battle, McLean House, and ended at the Gordon-Chamberlain salute/Grant-Lee second meeting site.

Some photos from the ride are below, courtesy of Kaysteine Briggs, who belonged to the staff group assigned to me, which proved to be an outstanding one. Although a bit chilly, we were spared the rain that accompanied the recon we did the day before and the April ride.

Sutherland Station

Hillsman House Here, and throughout the ride, a major point of debate was just how much faster Phil Sheridan would have ended the war if not for that punk George Meade. (Boy, wouldn’t it be great, especially at a time when people are trying to figure out how to spend gift cards, if there was a really good recent book out there on Meade–or even just a decent essay? For that matter, wouldn’t a book that discusses Lee during this campaign–especially one that, in the words of one unimpeachable source “shows once again why [its author] is one of the finest Civil War military historians at work today”, also be a great addition to one’s bookshelf? )

Kershaw Ridge

Near Appomattox Court House

And remember: Dissing neo-Confederate schlock makes Baby Jesus cry.  I’m looking at you, Kevin Levin.

Originally published in Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, August 24, 2005

Only the most devoted readers of this blog will recall that I’m under contract to write a book in the Oxford University Press Pivotal Moments in American History series, edited by David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson. McPherson published the inaugural volume in the series — Antietam: Crossroads of Freedom — in 2002. Fischer’s contribution to the series, Washington’s Crossing, came out last year. Six other books in the series have also appeared, with at least one more in press.

My “pivotal moment” deals with 1864. It was a presidential election year, so the most obvious pivot is the question of Lincoln’s reelection. Usually this is framed in terms of whether the Democratic nominee, George B. McClellan, might have defeated him in November, and whether that, in turn, might have led to a compromise peace or even Confederate independence. But given that Lincoln faced no fewer than three challenges from within his own party, one must also think about the chances of his being replaced — by Salmon P. Chase, John C. Frémont, or some other candidate. Believe it or not, the name of Benjamin F. Butler was bruited about more than once. And Lincoln quietly but carefully sniffed out Grant for possible presidential aspirations before appointing him general in chief.

Eighteen sixty-four was also the year in which white Americans, North and South, began to come seriously to grips with a change in the racial status quo. African Americans had a significant, albeit informal, influence over this shift, most obviously because Blacks were becoming increasingly important as a reservoir of military manpower.

In the realm of counterfactuals and contingency, Lincoln’s reelection is widely thought to have hinged on the perception of Union military success.

If the election had been held in August 1864 rather than November, Lincoln would have lost. . . . This did not happen, but only because of events on the battlefield — principally Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, and Sheridan’s spectacular victories over Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley. These turned northern opinion from deepest // despair in the summer to confident determination by November.” (James M. McPherson, “American Victory, American Defeat,” in Gabor S. Boritt (ed.), The Collapse of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39-40.

“There was nothing inevitable about northern victory in the Civil War. Nor was Sherman’s capture of Atlanta any more inevitable than, say, McClellan’s capture of Richmond in June 1862 had been. . . .” (Ibid., 41)

Albert Castel agrees, and greatly amplifies this thesis in

Albert Castel, “The Atlanta Campaign and the Election of 1864: How the South Almost Won By Not Losing,” in Castel, Winning and Losing in the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 15-32.

However, William W. Freehling — though in agreement that Atlanta “was the Confederacy’s last best hope to escape strangulation,” thinks that it was nonetheless a forlorn hope, that the point of no return had been reached in 1863. And he argues that certain structural factors — e.g., superior Northern military and industrial strength and internal stresses within the Confederacy — make Confederate victory unlikely in any event. As for Lincoln’s reelection being dependent on a timely military triumph, and Union victory being dependent on Lincoln’s reelection:

“[F]or military historians to be declared right that Sherman’s victory alone could have saved Lincoln’s victory, or that Lincoln’s victory alone could have saved Union victory, political historians must be proved dead wrong about antebellum politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular.” [William W. Freehling, “The Divided South, the Causes of Confederate Defeat, and the Reintegration of Narrative History,” The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 226-227] The former because 90 percent of 19th century American voters remained loyal to party, the latter because Peace Democrats were a minority within that party.

See also Freehling’s The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 177-199.

William C. Davis shares Freehling’s skepticism in “The Turning Point That Wasn’t: The Confederates and the Election of 1864,” The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 127-147. Davis does concede, grudgingly, that Confederate military success in 1864 could have unseated Lincoln, but ups the ante by implying it would have taken more than Atlanta.

In the end the only Confederate acts that could have — not necessarily would have — affected the outcome were those in the one theater in which the war was being decided from the outset: the battlefield. If Jubal Early had captured Washington and held it for some appreciable time. If Sterling Price had wrested Missouri from the Union and been able to hold it. If the forts at Mobile had been able to repulse Farragut and his fleet. If Lee had been able to take some action against Grant, however small, to embarrass him in the trenches at Petersburg. And most important of all, if Joseph E. Johnston or John Bell Hood had been able to turn Sherman decisively, not just away from Atlanta, but back on his base at Chattanooga. If all these ‘ifs’ had come to pass, they would have constituted a series of body blows to Union morale and Lincoln’s prestige, at the rate of one every few weeks during the last four months of the election campaign. Then quite possibly, even probably, sagging Northern spirits would have translated into Democratic votes.” (137)

This comes fairly close to the famous Saturday Night Life sketch that asked, “What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?” Even if the Confederates ran the tables, it would have resulted only in a McClellan victory, and Davis argues that McClellan would have continued the war and would have inherited a military position in which he could hardly have failed to win it.

Larry J. Daniel concurs with Davis and systematically critiques Albert Castel’s essay in “The South Almost Won By Not Losing: A Rebuttal,” North and South Magazine vol. 1, no. 3 (February 1998):44-48, 50-51. (BTW, I’m grateful to Eric Wittenberg for the loan of this article, which I was finding hard to locate.)

Most recently we have:

Richard M. McMurry, “The Atlanta Campaign and the Election of 1864,” appendix four of Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 204-208. He writes:

[F]orays into counterfactual history can be instructive. They often help us get a better understanding of the past by forcing us to examine roads not taken and the reasons why they were not. Such exercises, however, lose validity as they become more and more complex. They must keep within the bounds of the possible. It helps if we limit them to possibilities that were probable.

To apply such counterfactual speculations to the Atlanta campaign and the 1864 election, we have to work our way successively through a maze of at least a dozen counterfactual scenarios.

Which he does on pp. 206-207, and concludes:

In arguing that Lincoln had to have military success (or perceived success) in 1864 to win reelection, Castel was correct. I believe, however, that success came late on May 8 at Snake Creek Gap, not at Atlanta on September 2. Given the passive way [Confederate Gen. Joseph E.] Johnston was determined to conduct his campaign, loss of that meant that the Rebels could not — or at least really would not attempt to — halt Sherman’s advance into Georgia. (207)

It’s that last contention that justifies the focus on Snake Creek Gap in the Snake Bite series of posts. My purpose, however, is neither to introduce new revelations about this operation nor to argue that America’s future necessarily hinged on what occurred here. It’s to better understand the role of counterfactuals and contingency in historical interpretation — and figure out how to explain this to the readers of my OUP book.

Whether or not secession was an open question in 1860, most people argue that the Supreme Court’s 1869 decision in Texas v. White rendered it unconstitutional (although I have come across dissenting voices on that score).  However, as we see here, it’s not over until it’s over, even if you think it’s over.

When I was a boy my father and I would play “Civil War” in the backyard.  We were both armed with the best toys one could buy during the Civil War Centennial, including cap pistols and a fine Parris Rifle (no swords were allowed … my father was sure someone would poke out an eye, right, Ralphie?).  As one might surmise, I represented the mighty Yankees while my father gallantly portrayed the inevitably ill-fated Confederates.  As the Union prevailed once more along the creek that was once Coverts Pond (a battlefield which has resisted development efforts, although the people who bought our house installed a pool), my father would stand up for one last declaration of the faith.  “Save your Confederate money, boys!  The South shall rise again!”  Then it was time for dinner.

My father’s a wise man, but now I know that way back in the 1960s he was smarter than I then thought … although, of course, “the Confederacy” is not, contrary to opinion that’s popular in some quarters, the same thing as “the South.”   Historical fact has a way of testing our prejudices and finding them wanting.

I think the website needs a little work … or maybe reconstruction.

Note:  It’s worth noting that the management software for this site allows me to identify people posting from the same account/IP using multiple fake names.  As I’ve suggested in the comments, Mr. Bob Redman, who has made a practice of cyberstalking me over the years, has decided to use this thread to carry on his vendetta (supposedly on behalf of George H. Thomas) through assuming multiple fake identities.  I’ll handle the consequences as they arise.  General Thomas deserves better.

Some photos from a rainy visit to Valmy last week with my wife and daughter. The photo below on the left is of me and Corinne at the Kellerman monument; the photo on the right is of the famous Moulin de Valmy, a major landmark on the 20 September 1792 battlefield that was reconstructed a few years ago. Further down is a photo of the rear of the Kellerman monument looking toward the windmill.

Perhaps the most notable participant in this battle, aside from General Francois Kellerman (later given the title the Duc de Valmy), who famously rallied the French army by shouting “Vive la Nation!”, was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe later wrote of his experience:

I had now arrived quite in the region where the balls were playing across me: the sound of them is curious enough, as if it were composed of the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds. They were less dangerous by reason of the wetness of the ground; wherever one fell, it stuck fast. And thus my foolish experimental ride was secured against the danger at least of the balls rebounding.

In the midst of these circumstances, I was soon able to remark that something unusual was taking place within me. I paid close attention to it, and still the sensation can be described only by similitude. It appeared as if you were in some extremely hot place, and, at the same time, quite penetrated by the heat of it, so that you feel yourself, as it were, quite one with the element in which you are. The eyes lose nothing of their strength or clearness, but it is as if the world had a kind of brown-red tint, which makes the situation, as well as the surrounding objects, more impressive. I was unable to perceive any agitation of the blood; but every thing seemed rather to be swallowed up in the glow of which I speak. From this, then, it is clear in what sense this condition can be called a fever. It is remarkable, however, that the horrible uneasy feeling arising from it is produced in us solely through the ears. For the cannon thunder, the howling and crashing of the balls through the air, is the real cause of these sensations.

After I had ridden back and was in perfect security, I remarked, with surprise, that the glow was completely extinguished, and not the slightest feverish agitation was left behind. . . .

At last I was called upon to say what I thought of the engagement, for I had been in the habit of enlivening and amusing the troop with short sayings. This time I said, “From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.”

This passage was evidently on David L. Thompson’s mind when he recalled in an essay in Battles and Leaders that during the 9th New York’s attack at Antietam: “the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot. The usual strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion–the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”

From last week’s visit to Les Invalides:

You hear it all the time … at least I do.  Critics of this historian or that historian claim that the historian in question is pushing a personal political agenda.  Their professional work reflects that personal political agenda: if anything, their scholarship is nothing more than their politics refracted through a flawed prism of the past.

Doubtless this is true in some cases.  One could point to Howard Zinn or Thomas DiLorenzo as prime examples.  Other people confront the accusation as well: Eric Foner finds himself attacked as a Marxist when people don’t like what he has to say.  People who read Foner’s work seriously often find that his Marxism influences and informs how he approaches historical problems, but I haven’t seen a successfully sustained argument that his accounts of the Republican party in the 1850s, Thomas Paine, or Reconstruction, to name but three areas on which he has written with such skill, are warped by Marxism.  You don’t have to be a Marxist to agree with his analysis, and when I’ve differed I haven’t resorted to the cheap trick of calling him a Marxist as if that in itself was sufficient.  When we disagree, we do so on the basis of the work before us, not on our assumptions about the politics that some people think must be behind that work.

It is interesting to me that some people who are unabashed in their political positions and who freely reveal how their politics influences their historical perspective offer mindless rants claiming that other people’s history is flawed because of their politics.  This is especially true when they assume a set of political beliefs are held by the historian they criticize.  I came under such an attack some time ago, and when I pressed the blogger to outline my political beliefs, he declined, although he continued to insist that my scholarship must be flawed because I was supposedly left-leaning, whatever that means (he then resented being identified as a coward, claiming that was a personal attack, when in truth it was simply an accurate description of his behavior).  He was joined in his attack by a fellow who seems a bit reluctant in his professional biography to identify himself as a leader in a state chapter (or “division”) of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  You would think that if that fellow was really proud of that affiliation, he’d place it out front on his biographical sketches that accompany his publications.  Perhaps the best part of these recent rants was the claim that I was one of several historians who wanted to control the interpretation of history (again, somehow this claim was not accompanied by any evidence of this nefarious scheme: please forward it so I can use it on next year’s annual performance evaluation).  When this comes from a fellow whose group is famous for issuing “heritage violations” as if they were parking tickets, I have to laugh.  People who study this thing as a professional call this projection, I believe.

(Note: not all SCV members share the same beliefs or behave the same way.  So say my friends who are in the SCV.)

Now, personal perspectives and interests often influence what historians choose to explore.  I tend to be interested in the political struggles for emancipation and equal rights, for example, and how the political environment shapes that struggle.  Our SCV PhD, for example, prefers to regale listeners with stories about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s staff as well as “the deliberate Northern policy of targeting Southern civilians and Confederate prisoners of war for death.”  To each his own, I guess.  But I would find it bad historical practice to criticize the latter presentation simply by saying it was a simple reflection of his personal beliefs and perspective.  That’s poor historical criticism.  Nor would I make the wild-eyed assertion that the historian in question was attempting to control historical interpretation because I think that to make that claim about anyone is to make oneself look foolish.  But, again, to each his own.  If I disagree with an interpretation, then I’ll do it using evidence.  I’ve done this with the work of historians, regardless of their political beliefs, and in many cases I don’t know what political beliefs they possess.  To me it’s all about the work.

When I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I entered a rather politicized body of graduate students.  I once joked that there were no conservatives, liberals, or radicals at Madison: there were capitalists and Marxists, and I was clearly identified as being in the former camp (although when it came to a debate over financial aid, I found that the Marxist students were ironically the ones out for themselves at the expense of the community.  Don’t worry … they lost).  When I taught at Wofford College, Republican students asked me to serve as the adviser to the College Republicans, not because they believed I was a Republican (they confessed they didn’t quite know what I believed), but because I stood for the open discussion of ideas, and that was all they desired.  Since then, committed and principled conservatives have had no problem calling upon me: one placed me on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s civic literacy advisory board, and if you know anything about ISI, it’s not liberal.  In short, real conservatives respect me and my work, making it easy to dismiss the rants of certain uninformed partisans who hope that their intolerance and cant about political correctness and so on will be treated as something other than the whining it is.  Indeed, I think these folks are a standing embarrassment to serious conservatives: they are the Howard Zinns of the right, except that many of them lack his scholarly skills (I need not add that I don’t care much about Zinn’s scholarship, but then I also think Paul Johnson sometimes offers warped perspectives).

Serious conservatives and libertarians I take seriously.  Jeff Hummel sent me his manuscript on the Civil War era, and we once met for lunch: you can find my blurb inside his book.  I invited Barry Goldwater to speak to my military history class in the 1990s because I wanted him to have a chance to connect directly with my students.  Si Bunting and I have had many pleasant discussions, and when he came to speak in Phoenix last year, we had a terrific time … and we shared a stage with Jim McPherson last December at the New-York Historical Society.

And then there’s my teaching.  Two stories should suffice in that regard.  In the fall of 2000 I taught a course on the American presidency.  Many students recalled afterwards how in an October lecture I suggested that it would not be long until we would have to reacquaint ourselves with the workings of the electoral college, because someday it would play a critical role in an election outcome.  Others preferred to remember a different moment.  At semester’s end, two students approached me.  They identified themselves politically.  The Democratic student believed I was a Republican; the Republican student believed I was a Democrat.  They wanted to know which party I favored.  I asked why, and they responded that they didn’t know.  My reply was simple:  “And that’s how it should be.”  No one asks to which party do I belong: all students know that they will get a fair hearing in my classroom.  So it was with some satisfaction that a student e-mailed me yesterday to thank me for the letter of recommendation I had provided in support of his application for an internship.  He had just gotten the position … with the Heritage Foundation.  Apparently that organization trusted my assessment: it did not ask me to identify my political beliefs.

Now, does all this mean I’m a conservative?  No.  Indeed, it really doesn’t say anything about the political beliefs I hold, at least in terms of partisanship.  What it should suggest, however, to anyone with an open and discerning mind is that to the people who matter most … my students … there’s no political line preached in my classroom, and students from across the political spectrum have filled my classrooms and asked for my assistance, secure in the belief that what’s important to me is the work, the quality of argument, the use of evidence, and so on … not the politics of the student or the professor.  The same goes for my fellow professionals, whose beliefs are sorted across the political spectrum.

I understand it when people whose scholarship is fatally infected by their political beliefs assume that such much be the case with everyone they encounter … especially those with whom they disagree.  That’s why they call it projection.  Given them their fifteen minutes to issue their creeds: intelligent and discerning readers will know better.

Here it is, folks … the first interview linking Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals!

Once more The Comedy Channel demonstrates that it’s ahead of the curve when it comes to trends in popular political culture.

This little clip aired on The Daily Show just ten years ago.  Enjoy.

The blogosphere’s an interesting place.  Really.  Anyone can gain a measure of legitimacy by setting up a blog or posting reviews on Amazon or making comments on websites.  In an age of ever-opening information and access, everyman can be his own historian, as Carl Becker once put it … and everywoman as well.

Indeed, blogs are one way to challenge the supposed boundaries between professional and amateur, scholar and buff.  People who would not have gotten a hearing twenty years ago are now players in an ever-broadening discussion about the history of the Civil War era.  I count many of these people among my friends, even if they rooted for the wrong team in this past fall classic.

But with access comes responsibility.  If one enters the conversation and wishes to be taken seriously, then one must not run away when one is taken seriously and has one’s arguments subjected to scrutiny.  Here’s one example.

I don’t care much for the phrase “politically correct.”  All too often it’s simply a signpost that the author has decided that whatever he/she finds disagreeable can be dismissed simply by calling it “politically correct.”  It’s a neat way of sidestepping the issue of whether something is historically accurate, and it carries with it the assumption (an all-too-revealing one) that one’s perspective on historical events is hostage to one’s political beliefs.  Oddly enough, that characterization is often quite true when it comes to describing the very people who resort to this cant of “political correctness” as a substitute for sustained historical analysis.

Can anyone identify a scholar who subscribes to the set of beliefs outlined in this blog entry?  Does such a person exist?  Or is this to be taken as being more along the lines of a screed protesting uncomfortable truths by distorting them?

So, tell me, dear readers … can you name a historian who embraces the notion that the North was 100% right or the South 100% wrong?  I can’t, especially as “the North” is a rather diverse place, as is “the South,” and there was no single “Northern position” or “Southern position” (for example, black slaves in the South were southerners, too, as all those fans of black Confederates like to tell us).   Does any historian say that slavery was the only difference between North and South (especially as some slave states did remain in the Union)?  And what is this rant about black Confederates?  I don’t know of any historian who rejects the notion that the Confederacy employed slave labor (thus Butler’s contraband policy), or that a handful of people of African American ancestry served in Confederate ranks.  The debate is over what this means, as well as a demand that those who argue that there were tens of thousands of African Americans who voluntarily served in Confederate ranks produce a shred of evidence to support their contention (this is one place where the cry of “politically correct” comes across loudest, from people who would rather not submit their assertions to any sort of scrutiny).

Much the same can be said for some of the claims the author of this column makes about Reconstruction (the author’s own blog reminds us that he is also a “top 500 Amazon .com reviewer”).  And, of course, there are also some bizarre assumptions implied in the post.  Is someone going to argue seriously that Gone With the Wind (both the movie and the novel, but especially the novel) was not influenced by racist assumptions?  Its history of Reconstruction shows its dependence on a combination of the Dunning school, Thomas Dixon, and Claude Bowers.  The author is so angry about John Brown that he comes up not once, but twice, in the laundry list, but he has some kind words to say about the Ku Klux Klan as being somewhat misunderstood.

But here’s my favorite part of the rant:  “A defining trait of the PCM is the insistence that there is no such thing as the Politically Correct Myth of the American Civil War.  A second part of this argument is that there is no such thing as political correctness, just the truth.”  In short, to challenge this garbage is evidence that the author’s charges are true.

People who know me know I don’t suffer foolishness or stupidity gladly.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to circulate it for wider discussion in order to expose it for what it is.

With the deadline for submissions having passed, here are the books that have been submitted by publishers for the Society for Military History 2009 Book Awards:

And, for fellow suffering Redskins fans in need of a quick nostalgia fix, here’s something cool.