Five Years Blogging

Five years ago I flipped the switch to make this blog public.  The anniversary sort of crept up on me.  Reviewing that original “Purpose and Intent” post, I think I’ve been… well, sorta… true to the original goal.

At that time I’d just gotten settled into my new Virginia home.  After years of moving about, my career brought me to the lucrative Northern Virginia job market.  For much of the previous years, I was out of the country.  My life-long study of the Civil War had stagnated somewhat, with my activities focused on books.  As one who prefers to consider the battlefield from the battlefield, this was like running a race on crutches.  After those long years “cooped up,” I was able to get out and walk the battlefields again.

The great advantage to my new location was – and as I love to gloat over now, IS – its proximity to all the important sites in the Eastern Theater.  I run out of fingers and toes counting the battlefields within an hour from my front door.  And speaking of that front door, a lot happened in 1861-65 just a few footsteps from that front door!  I’m in a good spot for the sesquicentennial, which I’ve mentioned a time or two.

And I’ve also mentioned a time or two before that I’m more of a Western Theater guy, due to where I grew up and places I’ve lived over the years.  The Eastern Theater was, before the relocation to Virginia, a bucket list of stops to make on vacations.  Of course now these are sites which I can spend ample time studying in detail.  I’ve now been to some of the most obscure sites in the Eastern Theater… in many cases just to say I have been there, but mostly to appreciate what IS there.

The problem I encountered with all these visits was simply organizing thoughts and notes to fuse into good records of what I had learned.  So for the most part, this blog started out as a way for me “to aid the organization and presentation of my research, notations, and observations regarding the study of American history, in particular the Civil War.”

As I say, I think the blog has stayed true to that purpose.  Occasionally I get a bit out of the lane.  I’ve evolved the core topics of focus a bit, sharpened into the “three”: artillery, historical markers, and battlefields.  Of late, I have enjoyed pulling up my old files, particularly on the Western battlefields, to setup sesquicentennial timed posts.  With a few exceptions, the only contemporary topics that I’ve aired here are about sesquicentennial observances and preservation.  The later, due to my preference to experience the battlefields as a primary resource, is very important to me.  You may not agree with where I’ll stand on preservation, but I hope we can agree it needs to be discussed.

I’ve purposely steered away from some of what I consider the “pedestrian” topics in the Civil War discussion.  Let’s face it, there are some topics that everyone has an opinion about.  Sure, I think scholarly studies of Lincoln or the causes of the war (or even black Confederates) are still necessary. However, nobody is going to further the study of those subjects without many dedicated years.  Or in plain speech – we should shut up and listen a lot more than we do.

After five years, can I call this project worth the time spent?  Or to put it in plain talk – is “To the Sound of the Guns” a successful blog?

My IT professional background prompts me to cite metrics and figures.  But honestly I don’t set much store by the hit counts.  Truth be known, the Civil War blogging community is but a small particle in the larger web.  The blogosphere is dominated by a lot of other topic areas.  My pal XBradTC over at Bring the Heat will gather more hits in a month than most Civil War blogs see in a year.  So that sort of metric is relative, relatively speaking.

The way I see it, success of a blog like the one I’m running here is not just a measure of hits and views.  Rather it is how clear and useful the information is served to the reader.  I’ve wanted this blog to depict my evolving understanding (which I’d argue is what a true blog is supposed to be).  My “log” of the information distilled into knowledge, if you will.  A few years ago I did that with the Edwards Ferry topic.  By the time I had consumed and digested all I could lay my hands on, I had about thirty posts to show for the effort.   Those spanned over a year in time.  By the end of it all, maybe I didn’t introduce anything “new” to the Civil War discussion.  But, if the daily counts of search engine hits is any measure, I’ve put some content out there which was missing from the web.

I see that as “laying it all on the table.”  I’d rather share what I have, in the hope of a connection that will further add to the understanding.   Sure, I look back at some posts, particularly early ones, and figure I need to write up a new, revised version.  The first “series” I ran covered Maryland Heights.  I look back and realize how much more I know now – particularly offered by way of acquaintances met through contact on this blog – compared to what I knew then.  Likewise, I consider it the highest of blogging honors for something I’ve written here to aid someone else in their study of the topic.  I’ll treat pingbacks like gold coins any day of the week.

In that respect, if I can look back five years from now and identify how much more my understanding has improved, and at the same time having aided others to improve their understanding of the Civil War, then I’ll call it a good decade’s worth of writing.

And as long as I’m running an “administrative” announcement for the day, let me again mention you can follow me on Twitter or on the “To the Sound of the Guns” Facebook page.  News items and comments less worthy of a blog post appear in those feeds.

Before the Days of the Blog

Earlier this week, Harry posed the question: what is a “Civil War blog”? A fair question. One he and I (and others) have debated over beers. And it’s not like the answer becomes an enforceable definition.

Robert, as he often does, answered Harry’s question with a question: who are Civil War bloggers? Again another good question to ponder.   I don’t want to inject words into anyone’s keyboard output strings, but both questions point back to discussions about the types of historians. Does one have to establish a set of “credentials” to be a historian, and by extension ply the product called “history” to the public for consumption?  I hate to call that a professional (or academic) vs. amateur debate.  But that’s where most folks take it.

These questions that prompted me to hop in the way-back machine to examine my roots in Civil War blogging. My original “Hello World” post captured what I was thinking at the time. Since then I’ve edged about in some different directions. But the underlying concept remained – share what I have, just hoping the information connects with what others have… to build common understanding.

So did that noble idea start with blogging? Well let’s dial the way-back machine to the early “Internet”.

In 1992, when most folks thought “email” was a typographical error, I had an @ after my name.  Being part of the Army’s elite Signal Corps, the internet was our frontier.  Stationed in Korea with lots of off hour time in which to do nothing important, I became involved with the “bulletin board” communities. We posted files, mostly little applications for geeks to use.  But on mine I had a folder called “CivilWar” – all one word, mind you – with text documents I thought worth sharing.  Got a few exchanges.  But in those days the internet was the realm of true geeks.  Our 386 computers would not waste much of the 9600 baud connections on anything short of productive data transfers.  Still somewhere on that old hard drive is my “review” of Ken Burn’s Civil War… sans Ashokan Farewell.

I made forays into the USENETs back then.  I can’t remember if it was alt.war.civilwar.us or soc.history.civilwar.us or some other derivation.  But again, given the bandwidth of the time, there were some lively discussions.  And the tone was that of “contributing” to the general knowledge.  And everyone seemed to have something to contribute.

Sometime in the following year, the fine people at America OnLine were kind enough to send a floppy disk with AOL 1.5 to me.  How honored!  So I loaded that up.  Great concept – chat rooms and message boards.  Modems ran at 28.8, and we had bandwidth to burn!   Naturally I was drawn to the corner of AOL where Civil War types hung out – the Mason-Dixon Chat Room.  With hundreds forum posts and hours spent in the chat room, I became a regular.  Being a regular, I was offered the role as “moderator” and took on the nom de guerre of “CW Host 16″.  Weekly trivias and two hours of chats were the staple.  Heck, I even met my future wife in that crowd.  No kidding.  Long before eHarmony, the Mason-Dixon Line was hooking people up!    (I know, TMI…)

Still the activity was focused on “contributions.”  Not uncommon for someone to open a forum thread with several pages of information about a topic – some common place others obscure.  Heck, I learned all I ever wanted to know about ships’ anchors as used in the Civil War from one of those posts.  We also had a “files” section where contributors offered up papers or pictures for the greater audience.  Remarkably, most of the submissions were original materials, and often well researched and written.

I was proud of being a “manager” in an online history community.  Even listed it on my resume when applying to graduate school. Unfortunately I found out most inside the faculty rooms had no clue what AOL was, much less a chat room or message board.  Some things never change….

By the late half of the 1990s, AOL was sending out CDs to anyone with a mailbox.  Everyone had a @aol.com account and the chat rooms were hopping. Soon the company that brought the USENET eternal September had brought the Vandals to the gates of Rome.  Not much fun being a chat room moderator when the chat room has the tenor of a road-house bar.  The topic of the day, every day, was a mix of “the south was right!” and “black Confederates” and “Lee should have moved to the right” and “Grant was a drunk” and “Abe Lincoln: Despot or Liberator.”   The true “contributions” tapered off amid a deluge of “I think…” submissions.

Finding it of little practical value, and much frustration, I left the Mason-Dixon Line forum/chat room around the start of the new century (that sounds SOOO cool).    I hear the place lingered on until AOL collapsed the old forums in 2004-5 or so.  Crying shame.  If you look for those old chat logs, message boards, or documents, there’s scant trace of what was, for a time in the 1990s, a frontier establishment in the Civil War internet community.

Now back from that trip down memory lane… back to blogging.  The blog format took hold just about the time AOL started axing those forums and chats.  The great thing about the blog format, improving over the old formats, is the authority of the author to maintain the topic, tone, and tempo.  The old format allowed parity, which is a good quality but often arrives with unwanted results.  The new format, while more authoritarian, is better suited for the “contribution” to the community.  Some bloggers are OK with free for all comments.  Others, like me, prefer to showcase free speech by shunting the trolls, filibusterers, or distractors.  Others just flat don’t allow comments, recognizing they do alter the context of the contribution.  To each its own.

Bottom line here is that I seek out, and seek to produce, content that contributes to the community.  While I don’t wish to impose that upon others and their blogs, I would consider that objective to be the definition of a true “Civil War Blog”.   And that qualifier is not something appearing new with the blog format.  It’s been around since the dawn of the internet… or perhaps longer….

That’s my thought of the day… with a grain of salt.

Douglas Southall Freeman and social media historians

Only with much side-stepping (or a bit of ignorance!) can you discuss the Seven Days’ Battles without mention of Douglas Southall Freeman.  Even today, nearly sixty years after his death, Freeman’s work stands large in respect to the 1862 campaigns, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the war in the east.  Considering the historiography of the war, Freeman is one of the more prominent, if not the most prominent, of the post-veterans generation.  And like many of his time, he held direct ties to the war as the son of a Confederate veteran.  Agree with him or not, if one studies the war sooner or later you must get acquainted with the author of Lee’s Lieutenants.

With dual careers as a newspaper editor and historian, Freeman did not follow the average career path for a historian.  And all the while, his work in the field of history was not compromised. He produced meticulously researched lengthy volumes that stand as fine examples of the historian’s craft.  Perhaps his position astride two professions gave Freeman more latitude when presenting history to the “masses.”  In my view, nothing illustrates that point better than the “Freeman Markers” which still, to this day, orient visitors to Civil War sites around Richmond.

Once again, let me point readers to Bernie Fisher’s excellent site detailing the history of those markers.  In the 1920s, the “Battlefield Markers Association” established interpretation at important sites around Richmond.

Setting aside the War Department interpretive tablets at the five original battlefield parks, the Freeman Markers were the first permanent public interpretation on the battlefields (I consider the monuments of the war generation less objects of public interpretation and more memorialization, but that’s my opinion for what it is worth).  In their placement, the Freeman Markers employed the last of the veterans generation and the first of the centennial generation.  In terms of the evolution of interpretation, these markers provide a transition between the memorials into the pure interpretive displays appearing from the centennial years up through today.  So these markers of stone and iron represent the bridging of generations, to some degree.

What’s more, these markers, in form and function, catered to a road bound audience.  Forward thinking on the part of Freeman and his cohorts, if you ask me.

And these markers served to do more than educate visitors.  The words raised in cast iron also raised awareness of the sites… towards battlefield preservation.  The Battlefield Markers Association lead into the Richmond Battlefield Parks Association, with an explicit aim to both preserve the sites and promote accessibility.  In time those efforts greatly aided the establishment of the Richmond National Battlefield Park that we know and enjoy today.  The markers were part, an important part, of a preservation campaign.

But consider how those markers fit within the context of their times. When Freeman and crew were placing these markers, the “new thing” in terms of mass marketing techniques was the road-side billboard.  Serialized signs for promoting Burma-Shave were appearing along heavily trafficked roads.  Within a decade, barns across the South would feature “See Rock City” logos. In their form, the Freeman Markers employed that mass-marketing technique towards the goals of education, awareness, and ultimately preservation.

I see parallels to how Freeman used the markers, starting in the 1920s, to what we are doing today with social media.  Historians from the ranks of the blogroll to the right of this post (OK… such as myself) use blog posts, tweets, status updates, and photo shares to achieve the same general goals that Freeman worked towards.  (… and as Robert Moore will quickly remind us, not all education, awareness, and preservation need be acted out on physical objects or sites.)  We are using the “new thing” of our generation – social media – to pitch the same product.

I dare say if Douglas Southall Freeman were alive today, he’d have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a Linkedin account, and probably more than a few images pinned in Pinterest.  His sails would catch every yard of that prevailing wind. Why would any dedicated historian chose to do otherwise?