Bruce Miller’s excellent article (December issue) on the North- South Skirmish Association highlighted N-SSA’s recent national competition. Jack gave four pages in a big, colorful spread for photos submitted by Niki Bethke, Ericka Curley and Lis Cole.
Our newspaper has always been a hardscrabble production, so everyone knows that our sinewy budget doesn’t provide for contributors’ stipends. Thus we are delighted when Joan Wenner, attorney in N.C., sends us such pieces as that on the Medal of Honor’s first recipient, Jacob Parrott.
Where would we be without Gould Hagler? A retired lobbyist for the Georgia Independent Insurance Agents, Gould lives in north Atlanta and enjoys visiting such battlefields as Griswoldville, Georgia. His eclectic war interests are reflected in the title of his column, “This & That.” Last August, for instance, Gould featured Lt. George McClellan’s service in the Mexican War. “One episode in Sears’s biography especially caught my attention,” he writes in a sidebar, referring to Stephen Sears’ excellent biography of the young Napoleon (1988). His writing style is personable, even chatty. Firstperson, conversational prose is a rarity in journalism (and nonexistent in academia). It’s just the kind of writing that Jack Melton looks for in our paper’s offerings.
To see all of this year’s current events visit our website:
We’ve recently had to say sayonara to Michael Shaffer’s regular column, “The Source.” Mike has turned his attention to topics as varied as the New York Times’ war reporting and the two dozen varied volumes turned out from 1956 to 1965 by the Confederate Publishing Company of Tuscaloosa. (William C. Harris’ Leroy Pope Walker: Confederate Secretary of War [1962] graces my Confederate biography bookcase.)
Regular, paying subscribers are sine qua non, of course. But we could not do it without our advertisers. Mike Kent runs his full-page schedule of upcoming shows. (See you in Dalton!) By the way, that’s Mike pictured in his ad, resplendent in a cavalryman’s uniform.
I’m personally grateful to Jack and Peggy Melton for giving me opportunity to write my monthly “Critic’s Corner” for Civil War News. Growing up with Civil War Times Illustrated, I was always fascinated by James I. Robertson’s regular feature, “The War in Words,” which ran from April 1972 to December 1987 (whew!). Well, a couple of years ago I proposed writing something of the same sort for Civil War News, and Editor Melton said yes. So we were off: my first piece (CWN March 2022) approached Thomas DeLeon’s Four Years in Rebel Capitals (1893). Since then, we’ve looked at such war-era authors as Robert G.H. Kean and Charles C. Coffin, as well as offered appreciation for noted scholars of our time (e.g., Albert Castel, remembered in our column for August 2022).
