The Road to Becoming a Civil War Historian
I was born in the midst of the centennial of the War Between the States, so perhaps it was only natural that I would grow up fascinated by the subject. Somehow or another the allure of the conflict had already grabbed hold of me before I first encountered it officially during the fourth grade. We lived in Indiana at the time, and that was the grade when you studied Indiana history. The chapter on the state in the war was very short, but did include a cool drawing of militia contesting John Hunt Morgan’s raid. Needless to say I was hooked. The How & Why Wonderbook on the Civil War and a host of other books aimed at younger readers did the rest. I devoured everything that I could find in our local library and wanted more.
A few years later, I discovered Civil War Times Illustrated magazine — courtesy of a kind gentlemen who needed to get rid of many years worth of back issues because he was moving — and then it was on to the wonderful writing of Bruce Catton.
From Indiana, my familymoved back to Kentucky about the time I entered Jr. High School. Then in 1975 we moved to Texas. The long drive between the two states took me into the old Southern Confederacy for the first time and I was thrilled to be traveling across the geography I knew from reading about the war. Billboards advertising the Vicksburg Battlefield Park drove me too distraction! By the time I was in college, studying the war was already a lifelong hobby. Thanks to a great professor at the University of Texas, Dr. George Forgie, I determined to become a professional historian… and also thanks to him I met some of my oldest and closest friends — Gill Eastland and Mike Moore. Mike was a reenactor, one of what today would be called the “hard core” school, and he introduced Gill and me to the hobby. We’ve been doing it ever since.
Getting into reenacting, or as we prefer to say, living history, literally changed my life. It is how I met most of friends, it took me to battlefields and museums I had always wanted to go to, it gave me a deep and vivid understanding of the tactics and weapons of the period as well as the life of the common soldier. It was travel, comarderie, adventure, education all rolled up into one —- everything positive about a military experience with few of the negatives. It also helped me burnish my skills as an educator through doing hundreds of public programs, organizing events and researching the history of battles, soldier life and more.
After getting my master’s degree from UT, I began teaching as a part time instructor at Austin Community College. Contacts made through reenacting led me to a job at the Admiral Nimitz National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas — where I got involved in WWII and WWI reenacting — and eventually being curator of collections and director of the museum’s living history program. In 2002 my first book, The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch, was published by the University of Texas Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Battle-Civil-War-Palmetto/dp/0292734611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394046563&sr=1-1&keywords=9780292734616
Researching and writing that book was enormously fun and satisfying. It made me want to write another one, but on what subject?
The answer was easy.
From the very beginning of my trek into the world of Civil War history, one name had soared above all the others in the saga of the war — Gettysburg. It was accepted wisdom that this was THE great battle of the war and its turning point. Most of the famous historians who wrote about the war advanced that thesis and the mere fact that more books existed about Gettysburg than any other single battle codified it. Even the movie Gone With the Wind did its part — Rhett Butler telling Scarlett that “there was a little battle going on in Pennyslvania at a place called Gettysburg that ought to pretty well decide things one way or the other.”
Absorbing this conventional wisdom, I too placed Gettysburg at the center of the entire Civil War universe. Thus I was shocked when Dr. Forgie, during his outstanding class on the conflict, pondered out loud on whether Gettysburg was as important as everyone seemed to think it to be. At first I resisted the very notion, but the more I thought about it, and the more I discussed it with him, the more I realized I was having a hard time defending the battle as the war’s turning point.
That realization took me down the path of writing another book and studying a phase of the war that has received but scant attention from scholars for 150 years.
A few years later, I discovered Civil War Times Illustrated magazine — courtesy of a kind gentlemen who needed to get rid of many years worth of back issues because he was moving — and then it was on to the wonderful writing of Bruce Catton.
From Indiana, my familymoved back to Kentucky about the time I entered Jr. High School. Then in 1975 we moved to Texas. The long drive between the two states took me into the old Southern Confederacy for the first time and I was thrilled to be traveling across the geography I knew from reading about the war. Billboards advertising the Vicksburg Battlefield Park drove me too distraction! By the time I was in college, studying the war was already a lifelong hobby. Thanks to a great professor at the University of Texas, Dr. George Forgie, I determined to become a professional historian… and also thanks to him I met some of my oldest and closest friends — Gill Eastland and Mike Moore. Mike was a reenactor, one of what today would be called the “hard core” school, and he introduced Gill and me to the hobby. We’ve been doing it ever since.
Getting into reenacting, or as we prefer to say, living history, literally changed my life. It is how I met most of friends, it took me to battlefields and museums I had always wanted to go to, it gave me a deep and vivid understanding of the tactics and weapons of the period as well as the life of the common soldier. It was travel, comarderie, adventure, education all rolled up into one —- everything positive about a military experience with few of the negatives. It also helped me burnish my skills as an educator through doing hundreds of public programs, organizing events and researching the history of battles, soldier life and more.
After getting my master’s degree from UT, I began teaching as a part time instructor at Austin Community College. Contacts made through reenacting led me to a job at the Admiral Nimitz National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas — where I got involved in WWII and WWI reenacting — and eventually being curator of collections and director of the museum’s living history program. In 2002 my first book, The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch, was published by the University of Texas Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Battle-Civil-War-Palmetto/dp/0292734611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394046563&sr=1-1&keywords=9780292734616
Researching and writing that book was enormously fun and satisfying. It made me want to write another one, but on what subject?
The answer was easy.
From the very beginning of my trek into the world of Civil War history, one name had soared above all the others in the saga of the war — Gettysburg. It was accepted wisdom that this was THE great battle of the war and its turning point. Most of the famous historians who wrote about the war advanced that thesis and the mere fact that more books existed about Gettysburg than any other single battle codified it. Even the movie Gone With the Wind did its part — Rhett Butler telling Scarlett that “there was a little battle going on in Pennyslvania at a place called Gettysburg that ought to pretty well decide things one way or the other.”
Absorbing this conventional wisdom, I too placed Gettysburg at the center of the entire Civil War universe. Thus I was shocked when Dr. Forgie, during his outstanding class on the conflict, pondered out loud on whether Gettysburg was as important as everyone seemed to think it to be. At first I resisted the very notion, but the more I thought about it, and the more I discussed it with him, the more I realized I was having a hard time defending the battle as the war’s turning point.
That realization took me down the path of writing another book and studying a phase of the war that has received but scant attention from scholars for 150 years.
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