Misc
Brother’s of War-The Iron Brigade at Gettysburg.
The Iron Brigade (also known as the Black Hats because they wore the hats of the US Regulars) in the Union Army of the Potomac initially consisted of the 2nd, 6th, 7th Wisconsin Infantry and the 19th Indiana Infantry. Battery B, 4th US Artillery was attached to the brigade. The brigade after severe losses at Antietam was brought […]
Billy Mitchell was Right (and still is).
I grew up in West Allis Wisconsin-a suburb of Milwaukee. There was parkway and a well-to-do neighborhood (well-to-do in those days) near my school. Sometimes, rather than go right home after school, my friends and I would walk over to the parkway and imagine “playing army” or otherwise adventure around-all the things young boys would […]
Stand Your Ground
One character from the War of Independence that I’ve found interesting, even intriguing, is Captain John Parker. Captain Parker’s main claim to fame comes from his role as the Captain of Colonial Militia for the area around Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Parker was a militia captain served served in the French and Indian War in […]
A Christmas Carol, Life Magazine, December 25th, 1944
Long before A Christmas Carol was a movie it was a radio play. Lionel Barrymore played Scrooge for many years on Christmas Eve starting in 1934. In 1944 a movie studio gathered the radio play actors and staged scenes for Life Magazine. The issue with A Christmas Carol came out on December 25th, 1944. At […]
On Renaming Army Bases
I was doing a little research for a blog post on the 21st WI Infantry-a unit that fought in the American Civil War. I found out they were mustered in at Camp Bragg in Fond du Lac County. The name of the camp intrigued me since a fellow by the name of Braxton Bragg was […]
Perryville, The Civil War Most Obscure Battle 2
Maney’s Brigade at Perryville In September of 2019 my wife and I traveled to South Carolina to visit her sister. While there we took in some Civil War sites which included Fort Sumter. On the way home we stopped in Kentucky to visit the largest Civil War battlefield in the state, Perryville. I plan to […]
Perryville, the Civil War’s Most Obscure Major Battle_1
On October 8, 1862, a hot and exceedingly dry day, Union and Confederate forces classed in the Chaplin Hills just west of Perryville, Kentucky, a small market town located southwest of Lexington in the commonwealth’s central bluegrass. Perryville-This Grand Havoc of Battle by Kenneth W. Noe, pg xiii So begins Noe’s exhaustive work on the […]
The Cleansing of US History
Did you have a choice of where you were born? Did you have a choice as to your parents? Did you have a choice as to what year you born? Did you have choice as to what culture you were born into? Did I? The answer to all these questions is of course not. All […]
Those that Lived It_Scalp Dance
A journalist for the Marysville, Kansas, Enterprise wrote this on August 17, 1867: Go…and point a houseless, impoverished man to the smoking embers of his dwelling, the work of savage hands, where but yesterday he had stock, grain and plenty, after years of hardships and say to him, “the triumph of humanitarian principles.” Kneel beside […]
History and Hobbies 
Entangling Alliances
Did you know that only Congress has the power to declare war? It indeed requires an Act of Congress to declare war; yet, since 1941, the US has fought in numerous wars involving US personnel and other wars by proxy where we supplied arms and munitions. The war in Ukraine is a proxy war that […]