THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Only fair to include this Mort Kunstler painting of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (bareheaded with pistol) in the Union defeat at Fredericksburg in December, 1862 since I posted the other, Rebel, one. Chamberlain, of course, was one of the heroes of Gettysburg, the following July. The stand (and concluding charge) of his Twentieth Maine Infantry [...]

Mort Kunstler, whose painting this is, is one of the leading sentimentalists of American Civil War art. He does Union pieces, too, but seems to prefer Rebel ones, probably because they sell better. Kershaw’s Brigade of South Carolinians held the sunken road on Marye’s Heights at Fredricksburg in December, 1862, stopping multiple Union charges until [...]

Meryl Yourish: What A Difference A Gun Makes Harry Smeltzer: Living Monuments Bernie: Should Putting Women on a Leash Be Legal? Zombie: Mohammed Image Archive J-Lem Post: What to do with lemons like Thomas Friedman Bernie, again: Gross Muslim Jokes Amazon: Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle Knoxville 1863: Civil War Flapdoodle

Of the scores of old and new battle tanks on open-air display at the Israeli Armored Corps museum at Latrun, west of Jerusalem, only the M-4 Sherman gets a tall pedestal and flood-lamps to spotlight it by night. The modified M-4 was Israel’s mainstay in the wars of 1948 and 1956 and was still in [...]

The new U.S. Army recruiting commercial, a paean to West Point, ROTC and the OCS, is stirring. But it skips from Washington to Teddy R. and onward, missing Grant, Sherman. The freeing of the slaves, guys! No big deal? I suppose there’s just too many Southerners in the Army these days to want to risk [...]

The Civil War reenactor community gets more ludicrous by the day. This latest compilation of pictures of these stern-faced, white-haired, pot-bellied pretend soldiers at today’s 150th commemoration of the firing on Fort Sumter shows the trend. They’re less reminiscent of real Civil War soldiers than they are poster boys for the 21st century’s geriatric obesity [...]

That’s how many misspellings, typos and left-out words I found in The Longest Nights: General John D. Imboden & The Confederate Retreat From Gettysburg. It’s a modest piece of short journalism, obviously written to snag some sales during the Civil War Sesquicentennial. It mainly joins lengthy quotes from Imboden’s post-war magazine articles, and quotes from [...]

Not that I expect to equal this result any time soon, because crime novels have always sold better than Civil War ones. But I’ve been watching the debate over how unknown, indie authors can best amass readership without extensive (and expensive) marketing and I’ve become convinced that pricing one’s eBook at 99 cents is an [...]

Robert Moore, at Cenantua’s Blog has it: “The victor gets to write the history…” True, but in the case of the Civil War, he didn’t get the product endorsements or the residuals. Poor Uncle Billy Sherman. Jesus wept.

Add Dr. Thomas Lowry’s name to the pantheon of historian shame that includes plagiarist Stephen Ambrose and Vietnam combat-phony Joseph Ellis. Lowry is accused by the National Archives of admitting that he used a fountain pen to vandalize a document written by President Lincoln. Lowry, whose forgery went undiscovered for fourteen years and even inspired [...]