TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog

I am heading out to
Winchester tomorrow morning to begin preparations for the North-South Skirmish Association’s 116th National Skirmish, which will be held October 3-7. For those of you unfamiliar with the N-SSA, we shoot live ammunition in Civil War military arms ranging all the way from revolvers to cannon. Twice a year, the third weekend [...]

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I’ve read and noted the new titles listed by Brett. However with this post I want to recommend some older titles(in some cases over a century old) you may have missed. They aren’t especially obscure, all have been published and discussed since the 19th century.
“Army Life in a Black Regiment.” Thomas Wentworth [...]

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Book Purchases: September 2007 Books #11-20
Note: Those of you who followed my now defunct blog American Civil War Gaming & Reading will instantly recognize the format and reasons for this blog entry. For anyone new, my purpose is to post a list of books I’ve bought in the past month, provide information on and [...]

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AGEOD’s American Civil War has been patched to version 1.07 according to a news release at the Wargamer web site. This thread at the AGEOD Forums discusses all the changes.

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2. Buying Time
One of the reasons there were only 300 Spartan’s at the battle of Thermopylae was that the king could not win support of his constituents to go to war, and so took his own “bodyguard” of 300 off for a stroll. Apart from winning support for the war at home, Leonidis’ actions gave [...]

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I had stopped in Borders Bookstores here in New Jersey to get a cup of coffee and do some quiet reading..
I picked up a copy of one of the Civil War magazines and in it was an article on the group that is SUING the NPS to “Save” the Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg. For those [...]

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When I was in college 25 plus years ago, doing research consisted mainly of going to the library, pulling books and journals off the shelf, slogging through reel after reel of microfilm and, if you were lucky, finding a gem or two that was buried deep within a dry dusty tome. While the basics of [...]

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I just love browsing through used book stores! In three decades of heavy business travel, I have made it a point over the years of finding stores that cater to my hobbies and interests - baseball card shops, miniature wargaming stores, and used bookshops. The latter is the most prevalent by far, and often the [...]

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My first posting, Brett informs me, should be one of personal introduction, something with which I’ve almost always had great difficulty. But it helps to be a little crazy, so I’ll push stalwartly on like the old grenadier that I’ve been lately pretending and imagining myself to be.
It feels extremely comfortable and somehow vindicated to [...]

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Lectured on John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. They learned the name “John Brown” in connection with Bleeding Kansas last class. This class I passed out a photograph of Brown without identifying him and asked for their impressions. Brown looks fairly grim in all his photos and the responses were predictable. [...]

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