A Relaunch of Sorts

You may have noticed a lack of posts lately. Really, since June.

When I started this whole enterprise, in May of 2012, I was looking to create an outlet for my interests in historical research and interpretation. At the time I decided to narrow my focus to my favorite topic and place: Gettysburg. In last two and a half years and 180+ posts, the blog has evolved from its beginnings. So has my life: I've gotten married, I've moved from Central New York to Central Virginia, and I've changed jobs. Now I find myself engaged in historical research and interpretation relating to early American history everyday at work. With all these changes, I find that I have less time now to devote to my blogging hobby.

I find blogging difficult. I often struggle to find topics and issues on which to offer a unique and interesting perspective. When I started, I found the nights and weekends I spent researching somewhat obscure events relaxing and rewarding. I still do, but I've found that I don't have as much time to offer regular posts with the deep research necessary to meet my own standards. And yet, I still enjoy blogging as an outlet, and as a way to remain connected to the historical field. With this in mind, I've spent some time thinking about how I wanted to take this blog forward. I still want to work on the historical research that I so enjoy, but recognize that these posts will likely remain infrequent given my current time constraints. To keep the ball rolling in between these long-form posts, I've decided to focus on shorter entries with scaled back ambitions - sharing topical and timely links to other blogs and articles, brief snippets of content related to artifacts, photographs, and other primary sources, and book and exhibit reviews when appropriate.

So hopefully you'll begin to see a bit more from this blog again.Thanks for reading.

News and Notes - May 2014

It's been about a month folks, but new blog posts are coming. In a few days I'll have a few posts to roll out in my continuing series on the 3rd Division of the 6th Corps (formerly known as "French's Pets"). These posts will focus on the division's actions during the Battle of the Wilderness - timed as you might have guessed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of that battle.

A few other items you might want to read in the meantime:

- Over at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park's excellent blog Mysteries and Conundrums, Chief Historian John Hennessy previews the upcoming programs and events the park has planned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Overland Campaign. The lineup of programs looks excellent. I can't make all of the events, but I'm aiming to do my best to be there for some of the programs on May 10th and May 11th.

- There's been a lot of discussion about the successes and/or failures of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. A lot of opinions have been thrown out without much data and analysis to back them up. Well, enter Nick Sacco, who has a neat post up on his Exploring the Past blog that attempts to quantify the results of the Sesquicentennial through some basic visitation statistics at some of the major battlefield parks. The numbers might surprise you.

Enjoy.