In preparing the previous four stories about U.S. Civil War sites and their histories, I gathered and posted a number of related photographs. And I was left with dozens more to choose from. If you’re one who believes the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and that photographs as well as […]
Gettysburg to Surrender
Posted May 24th, 2011 at 7:21 pm (UTC-4)
Like a pesky fly that neither swatter nor sledgehammer can seem to catch and crush — or a hero who lived to fight another day in cliffhanger movie serials a couple of generations ago — undermanned but determined Confederate forces kept eluding certain destruction in the first two years of the American Civil War. […]
Second Bull Run Through Chancellorsville
Posted May 23rd, 2011 at 1:47 pm (UTC-4)
In our short course on the U.S. Civil War, we — or rather Union forces —made it as far as the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, in 1862. There the grinding war, barely a year old, might have been brought to a triumphant close had cocky, but overcautious, Union general-in-chief George McClellan pressed his advantage in […]
Fort Sumter Through the Peninsula Campaign
Posted May 20th, 2011 at 9:51 am (UTC-4)
As I told you when I first started this written adventure, I’d be asking you to put up with occasional sorties into American history as a backdrop to what our nation has become today. So pack your imaginary bags! I promised last time that I’d take you on a two- or three-part written and visual […]
A Poor Man’s Fight
Posted May 18th, 2011 at 12:19 pm (UTC-4)
The transcendent U.S. Civil War historian Shelby Foote came across a slogan used by southern opponents of secession and war — of which there weren’t many in a region that romanticized the rectitude of the cause. Poking the mighty northern bear, they warned, would lead to “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” […]
Our Everlasting Civil War
Posted March 24th, 2011 at 8:49 am (UTC-4)
The other night I watched actor-director Maximillian Schell’s fascinating 1984 docudrama about Marlene Dietrich, the glamorous (on-screen), reclusive (off it), German-born femme fatale who mesmerized cinema and cabaret audiences but lived her final years cloistered in a Paris apartment. A pragmatic woman utterly devoid of romantic reverie despite her public persona, Dietrich told Schell, over […]
Lessons from Long Ago
Posted January 24th, 2011 at 4:10 pm (UTC-4)
If you’re into the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s, this is your year in heaven. It’s the 150th anniversary of the beginning of that brother-against-brother conflict in which more than 600,000 Americans died, many quite miserably in hand-to-hand battle. For the sesquicentennial year, a number of Civil War scholars are trotting out new books […]
Tinnissee, Y’all
Posted January 17th, 2011 at 5:01 pm (UTC-4)
I haven’t written much about my father. That’s because I didn’t know him very well. He split when I was four. That’s a whole story for another time. But I spent a little time with him late in his life, after he had remarried, to a lovely retired schoolteacher whom Carol and I liked very […]
Memories in Stone
Posted January 14th, 2011 at 12:13 pm (UTC-4)
Whenever I get the chance — and it isn’t often enough — I’ll take my lunch hour across the street from our VOA offices, briskly walking as much of the Washington National Mall as time and weather will allow. So briskly, and so preoccupied by matters at work or the sports conversations streaming into the […]
Sharpsburg
Posted December 3rd, 2010 at 6:12 pm (UTC-4)
Out in the Maryland countryside, close by the Potomac River an hour west of Washington, D.C., lies a drowsy little town called Sharpsburg — population 666. Nobody except its townfolk and nearby farmers would pay much attention to it were it not for a meadow outside town that experienced the bloodiest single day in American […]
