TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

I see that Brett is offering a free copy of Earl Hess’s book on the rifle musket, so it might be a good time to revisit a controversy raised therein, namely did the ANV’s sharpshooter battalions punch above their weight in Virginia? I would say they did, and base this as much as anything on […]

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Update: Welcome to TOCWOC for those of you who have found this page through a Google Search!  If you enjoy what you’re about to read below, feel free to Subscribe to TOCWOC’s RSS feed.  Be sure to check out the Civil War Book Reviews which have been posted here and browse through TOCWOC founder Brett […]

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Drew Wagenhoffer has a short review up of Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth. Although he calls it “the best single volume treatment of the subject so far,” he does raise some significant questions, including one I hadn’t thought of (showing, again, the value of distributed intelligence). There is […]

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I have finished Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in the Civil War and will posting a review by and by, but before I do that I’d like to address one of his points, that of the role of the artillery. Hess and several other historians (e.g. Mark Grimsley, Gregg Biggs, etc.) have adopted the thesis […]

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