Your Combined Writing and Civil War Round Table for 9/8/20

A good first day of (virtual) school to all of you. The plan is for stay at home school to last a month. We're skeptical. Murphy and teacher's union to New Jersey: Drop Dead.

As noted before, in The Great Nuclear War of 1975 we're planning an ending chapter where two air force officers  reverse engineer the war. Now we're wondering if this idea wouldn't make for vignettes at the beginning of chapters. As we write this idea we like it less.

The Final Storm is coming along swimmingly. Our South chapter includes Managua and Cuba (where we revisit the Brazilians). We'll show Grranma of course, and something in the Los Vegas Salient. Maybe the Neocons plotting, remember Negroponte and Abrams? Excellent...

We'll need another vignette where Maggie is before parliament, we realized.

Man, we were looking at the shelf last night, we've read ten books about The War in the last six weeks, and we're about to order half a dozen more. W'd like to make something clear. We knew the Civil War pretty good beforehand. We're a former US History professor for the love of the Many Faced God, and we've written a pair of magazine articles on the subject (see sidebar). Now we're really getting down into, into the muck as it were. 

And we've learned a ton. Lee was a risk taker. The Army of Northern Virginia was the best in the field and one of the 5 best of the 19th century. Grant would stubbornly attack right up till the moment he thought it wasn't worth while. He thought Lee was one major battle away from breaking. Davis was a bad wartime leader. After Lee, Jackson, Stewart, Forrest, Confederate generals were average at bast and disastrously incompetent at worst; Johnston, Hood, Bragg. No one really understood the realities of the new kind of war or even that they were fighting a new kind of war, until 1864. and then only Grant and Sherman. If McClellan won in 1864 nothing would have changed. He wouldn't take office till March of '65. William C Davis is a great historian of the Confederacy. The University of Nebraska Civil War series is really good.