Civil Warriors

Thinking about the issues involved in publicizing one’s own books — the overwhelming majority of books that appear each year are surprisingly undermarketed, and authors really need to learn to fend for themselves — I (Mark Grimsley) got the idea for creating (yet another) blog. This one would be a collaborative effort among several Civil War historians. The point of the blog — its drawing card — would be to focus on the craft of Civil War history. We’d talk candidly about what we were doing, why we did it, what we hoped would emerge from it.

I drew up a long list of potential “Civil Warriors” but initially consulted the two with whom I’ve had the most experience. The first was Steven E. Woodworth (Jefferson Davis and His Generals; While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers; numerous other works — the man’s a machine — culminating most recently with Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865. The second was Brooks D. Simpson, also a copious producer of books, best known for his various works on Ulysses S. Grant.
The idea was that each of us would post to Civil Warriors in a somwhat round robin fashion, so that the burden of productivity would not fall heavily on any one of us. In the sidebars and on permanent pages we’d have info about what books we’d done and links to booksellers. In general I thought we might be able to craft a site that would be at least one good tool for marketing our own stuff.

So I bought the domain name CivilWarriors.Net — which, believe me — is easily and inexpensively done, and then got set to install yet another WordPress blog. Steve cautioned that he might not be able to submit his first contributions right away. By “right away,” he apparently meant the next five minutes, because the first of his promised blog posts appeared in my mailbox the next day.

So here goes with the maiden post of Civil Warriors, courtesy of Steve . . . .