News and Notes: Busy Times

It's been over a week since my last blog post, and unfortunately my time for blogging has been limited of late. I've made it through Hall of Fame Induction Weekend at work - the busiest time of the year - and over the next few weeks much of my free time will be spent in planning for a special day next month (I'm getting married). As a result, I will likely have fewer blog posts in August.

That said, I haven't completely shut down the work on new content for Battlefield Backstories. I've begun some research for a fairly substantial series of posts that will follow a division of the Army of the Potomac from the days after Gettysburg through the end of the war. And this weekend I will head down to the Antietam Battlefield with a group of friends for a camping trip. I haven't been to Antietam since 2008, so I'm excited to get out on the field and hope to spend a great deal of time on the hiking trails that wind through the battlefield. I am sure it will inspire a new blog post or two. I've also just picked up Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie from the local library. Last year I really enjoyed reading Levine's book on Confederate Emancipation, so I'm excited to dig into his latest. A Library Corner post will follow when I finish.

While Battlefield Backstories has been relatively quite of late, many other Civil War blogs have had interesting content over the last few weeks. In the aftermath of Gettysburg's 150th, many are asking if the sesquicentennial is "over" for the media and for mass public audiences. Kevin Levin and Brooks Simpson have considered this over the last week. You can read Levin's take here and here. Simpson offers some thoughts that can be found here and here. My own (very brief) commentary: certainly the attention to 1864/65 commemorative events will not equal Gettysburg, at least until Appomattox. Yet, I think public historians should view the next two years as an excellent opportunity to engage public audiences with the story of the last two years of the war, and to foster a better understanding of this dark period in our nation's history.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere, Jimmy Price offers a post on the 149th anniversary of the Battle of 1st Deep Bottom.

That's all for now.