TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

David P. Goldman is something of a polymath – scholar, investment banker, musicologist, and pundit. In the latter capacity, under the handle Spengler, he has written on a variety of subjects, including the Civil War. There, unfortunately, he comes off as being rather uninformed. Indeed one is tempted to use the characterization of Noam Chomsky […]

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What did the fabled Rebel Yell actually sound like? Smithsonian magazine digs up an old reunion tape to find out. The proposed slavery museum at Fredericksburg is on hold and is looking more doubtful by the day. It’s been dogged by controversy and poor financial management since its inception. Fold3 (formerly Footnote.com) looks at the […]

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Frequent blog readers probably know that I and a couple of others like Joe Bilby are always trying to confirm CW battle ranges. I recently came across an account of the battle of Corinth (Oct. 3-4, 1862) that talks about it. A soldier in the 2nd Iowa wrote: The Rebel batteries silenced ours, and about […]

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J.D. Petruzzi just posted about a new Civil War blog called To Appomattox.  It’s maintained by Greg Caggiano and Steven Hancock.  The most exciting news for me personally about this project?  Dexter’s Michael C. Hall is cast as Ulysses S. Grant.  Anybody who can convincingly play both a gay funeral parlor director and a blood […]

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Civil War novelist Kim Murphy takes a look at contraception during the mid-Nineteenth century. In the decades before the Civil War, there was no organized movement to advocate or control contraception. Freethinking printers and publishers began spreading the word about reproductive choices, and Charles Knowlton became the first American legally tried for the publication of […]

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In honor of the upcoming Civil War sesquicentennial The American Interest has begun The Long Recall: An Aggregator of the Civil War. Walter Russell Mead explains: We will use a modern form to present the daily news: our Civil War aggregator that combines a short daily summary of the news along with links to articles […]

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I received an email from Facebook tonight which alerted me to Scott C. Patchan’s new battle blog, Shenandoah 1864: The Valley Campaign. Scott is an expert on the lesser known 1864 Valley Campaign, much less covered than its famous 1862 cousin. He has authored three books on the subject, The Forgotten Fury: The Battle of […]

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