Category: Civil War
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Gettysburg After Action Report – September 10, 2017
On my 39th visit to Gettysburg, my wife and I had the privilege of taking Aishwarya who is a software engineer and an aspiring poet (she goes by Ash for short). This was an emergency trip, as she is slated to move back to India in a month after living in the States for 5 years…
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Rethinking War Monuments, Ancient and Modern
Herodotus knew where Leonidas made his final stand against the Persian invasion of Greece because of a lion monument erected on a hill at Thermopylae. He bragged about memorizing the names of the 300 Spartans who fought alongside Leonidas, which historians today believe he learned from a monument erected upon the king’s grave in Sparta.…
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First Impressions of the National African American Museum in DC
My wife and I were fortunate to get a last-minute invite to the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington D.C. I say fortunate, because you can’t even get tickets right now due to the high demand. Their website literally instructs you to try back in April for advanced tickets. I say…
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My Favorite Spot at Gettysburg
Welcome to the first edition of Warpath Wednesday, the day in which I recount something historical from the warpath. Today’s focus is my absolute favorite spot at Gettysburg: Sedgwick Avenue. First, I am an unlicensed tour guide of Gettysburg, which means I provide tours to friends, family, and coworkers for free. Want a professional? Then…
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Liberty Place Monument and #BLACKLIVESMATTER
Nestled between the Aquarium of the Americas, The Westin, and a parking lot, the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place is difficult to find, even with the Historical Marker Database. Last week, I tracked it down. This monument claims to pay tribute to the casualties on both sides of the 1874 battle—the New Orleans…
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“Don’t forget your roots, Yank”
I typically reserve these conversations for the battlefield. The toxicity of the Confederacy mixed with the Internet and long-held beliefs is a recipe that I prefer to avoid. Instead, I wait until I am with friends, family, or coworkers at Gettysburg or Antietam. There, I can talk freely about military strategy and tactics, and provide…
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Book Review: Protecting the Flank at Gettysburg
Clausewitz tells us “war is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war.” We can go one-step further in that countless duels make up a battle, especially larger battles. Historians such as Eric J. Wittenberg understand this and with a seemingly over-analyzed battle such as Gettysburg, he continues…
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Naming the American Civil War
The following was inspired by Jamel Ostwald’s question on who gets to name wars. Here are some battles with competing names from the Civil War. Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, we can get an idea of how often these phrases appear in books over the past 150 years. Antietam is a clear favorite over Sharpsburg. However,…
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Bring Your Black Friends to Civil War Events
After several people recently lamented the lack of black people at Civil War events along with potential reasons why this is the case, Jimmy Price described an experience at the macro level that I have experienced on a micro level. Quite simply—black Americans, especially men, are just as interested in discussing the topic of war, especially the Civil War, like any…
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The Three Types of Civil War Buffs
When friends and coworkers discover I frequently visit Civil War battlefields, they often ask me if I reenact. I do not. Never had the desire. Of course, this leads to the next question—then what the hell are you (and your friends) doing out there? Their tone usually indicates they could not conceive what else people…
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John Cummings’s “Harvest of Death” Location
For nearly two years, John Cummings has gone through a discovery process to find the location of one of the most iconic images from Gettysburg, and the Civil war—Alexander Gardner’s “The Harvest of Death” and its companion, “Field where General Reynolds Fell.” I still remember these images from my textbook in grade school. When I…
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The 150th of Pickett’s Charge from the Peter Rogers House
Roughly 15,000 people were there for the 150th of Pickett’s Charge. After walking these fields numerous times, I can confidently say you just cannot get to a spot where you can see all the highs and lows of the hills between Cemetery and Seminary ridges. Here is what I saw. By 12:00 PM on July…