Military History
City of Sedition
I keep thinking I’ll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours. I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: “check what [someone else] has to say, “compare to X”,…
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Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process…
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From the Archives: Walking Hallowed Ground
When this post goes live, I’ll be on my way to Gettysburg for the 2016 Sacred Trust program. Instead of trying to write a new post while my brain is full of Gettysburg, I’d like to share this post from June, 2011, on the question of battlefield visits in general and one special battlefield visit…
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