my little wheatfield site

I have a little website I wrote in 2002 on the battle of the Wheatfield at Gettysburg.

Since I have the luxury of time (something believe me a cancer survivor and someone who’s profession uses time as its stock in trade appreciates more than you think) , I redesigned and updated this little website.

Here is a link: The Battle of the Wheatfield at Gettysburg.

I didn’t update the core of the site, but I did update:

1) The design. I used a template, but as usual mangled it to make it at least partly mine. And the yellow — that’s ALL mine!

2) I added regimental histories from Dyer’s Compendium. Go to the “battle” essay and click on a regimental name and you’ll get the little histories.

3) I added some official reports.

4) I updated the “players” — i.e. the officers page. (Somehow I missed Philip De Trobriand and need to add him.)

5) I updated the photo page — though that still needs work.

I’d like to next update the design of my biography of Dr. Hunter McGuire (it also contains all my collected info on Civil War medicine), but we’ll see how ambitious I remain. And of course, I am still debugging the Wheatfield site. (I need to still do some real basic things like validate and tidy the XHTML.)

buggy buggy buggy

“My God, will these mosquitoes never satiate their vampieran appetite for blood? Buggy, buggy, buggy. There is no peace for the wicked, saith the good book. Mosquitoes were especially sent to earth as a torment to the wicked. Wonder if Noah had any in the ark with him!” Lieutenant A.P. Hill, October 16, 1848

I am currently uploading a new version of my A.P. Hill website. I have been diligently working on it for some time on the C: drive of my computer, but I have pretty much gone as far as I could go without having it “live” on the web. For some time, I am sure it will be “buggy, buggy, buggy” as I work out the broken pages (i.e. 404-errors) and weed out the inevitable XHTML and CSS errors with a validator. Please pardon the dust while I work on it. I plan to put some serious time into the site over the next week or so, and in the next two days in particular.

An update (6/27/07): Currently the search feature isn’t working (I am working on troubleshooting it). Also, I have found at least a few missing pages or pages where I miscoded an url. I’m working on these issues and hope to have them resolved in the next couple days.

Update 6/27/07 (2): I have fixed the search engine and am now working on weeding out broken links .

the Gregg-McGowan Brigade & history musings

A visitor asked what my favorite brigade in the Light Division was. I hate to play favorites, because I am sure Hill would have been careful not to show favoritism (he was a very good officer that way), but my favorite brigade is the South Carolina brigade of Maxcy Gregg and Samuel McGowan.

Just the visual of Maxcy Gregg, wielding his Revolutionary War scimitar at Second Manassas, lopping the “heads” off of the daisies, urging his men with “let us die here, my men, let us die here!” — that’s what makes history exciting, at least for me. The images. Maybe that’s why I liked the movie Gettysburg so much.

For historiography class — I was a history major in college — I had to write a paper on an historian. I was hoping for Douglas Southall Freeman.⁰ Yes, I was even an A.P. Hill fan back then and I was enthralled by R.E. Lee and then by the three volumes that made up Lee’s Lieutenants. But I ended up assigned with Allan Nevins who I had never read.

So I broke out “Ordeal of the Union” — that was Nevins’ main multi-volume treatise on the War. While of course no Lee’s Lieutenants (nothing measured up at that time for me with Freeman), I appreciated Nevins style. He wrote well. Not all historians can write well. And reading Nevins — who thought a lot about historiography — was the first time I had ever thought about the study of history.¹

My favorite Nevins quote came out of an address to the American Historical Association entitled “Not Capulets, Not Montagus”² in which he described history as like a painting. Some imagination, Nevins pointed out in some of his other works, was necessary to mix with the paint.

Nevins was concerned very much with the general public remaining interested in the historical field. He railed against boring academics. Nevins thought there was a large segment of the population out there who were interested in history, but needed it presented in a digestible form. He’s probably right, though I don’t think he was for the “dumbing down” of history. Nevins thought that a good knowledge of history was necessary to a democratic republic and though he thought history should be presented in an accessible way, I think it was a big part of his historical philosophy that historians shouldn’t automatically assume the public was dumb.

I’m not an academic historian — far from it. I think I am probably more of your Nevins prototypical, educated democratic republican … Hey, I admit I like military history and biography and my eyes always sort of glazed over when too much “academic” stuff was presented. And Then A.P. Hill Came Up has plenty of primary source material that stands on its own, but the point never was to produce an academic work. The point was to get people interested in history. Especially kids. Because history is a fascinating topic.

If And Then A.P. Hill Came Up has interested one person in history, then all the hours hacking away at it were worthwhile.

Anyway, I always liked the painting quote …. History can never be a photograph of the past — well, it can be, obviously as we do have what are snapshots of the past (be they film or recorded) — but once interpretation mixes in, history becomes more art than science. No historian is without biases. Its just not possible. Or at least that’s how I have always seen it. My favorite authors have always been the ones who could paint. Its nice to have the primary sources, of course, but without interpretation, without the images, history would be (as its critics point out) boring.

Hopefully And then A.P. Hill Came Up isn’t boring and hopefully it has the right mix of “real” history sources and narrative history to make it accessible and appealing to the general public, yet also useful to a large segment of the public, maybe even to a more academic audience. But I don’t really know. The site is unique because it has stuff written from Jenny at the tender age of 17 (still in high school, in fact) all the way to 27 — and you better believe my views on things (generals, battles, history) have changed. I think that’s inevitable with experience and with age.

The site was built partly for me — I admit it. It exists partly to fulfill a selfish interest in the Civil War period that I had no outlet for — I had the itch to write and create and I still do. But its never been about making money and I’ve always kept the site as a free source … sort of an internet A.P. Hill library. Its my little contribution to the world. (I’m proud of it, but I don’t pretend its a real work of art, like a book.)

I should also say that maintaining a Civil War website has been nothing if not interesting. The nature of the medium, the ability to change things totally at will, to evolve, is something authors of books don’t get as much opportunity for. I mean, an author can always publish a new edition, but nowhere near as easily as I can change my website. If I want to add stuff, I add it. Whenever I want.

I also love being able to trade information. Through my site, I’ve met all sorts of cool and interesting people. Everyone from Civil War historians and authors to just regular people who enjoy history (a few have even contributed to the A.P. Hill site). There is no better way to be found today than to be out on the world wide web.

I also have to admit to loving the technical aspects and challenges of having a website. I actually enjoy writing CSS code and changing the design from time to time — and I am a self-taught website designer (even more so than a historian; at least there I was a history major in college as an undergrad). Being a Civil War webmaster has involved not only learning about history but it has also entailed a lot of work learning to code XHTML and CSS (I am proud to say I hand-coded my A.P. Hill website). A Civil War webmaster is part historian, part techie. He or she has to be. Its rather cool and very 21st century.³

If you managed to wade through this widely rambling post, I am deeply impressed.

—
0. I need to spend more time surfing the Civil War blogsphere. Somehow I missed Richard Williams’ excellent Old Virginia Blog. There is an EXCELLENT piece right up front currently on Douglas Southall Freeman. Having browsed through Mr. Williams’ blog, I think its right up my alley — and probably the alley of you other A.P. Hill “fans” out there (c’mon I KNOW theres more than just me)

1. Speaking of blogging. As an aside: If you’re interested in historiography of the War Between the States, then you definitely need to start reading Dimitri’s blog, if its already not on your regular list. I don’t always agree with him (does anyone always agree with anyone, ever?), but Dimitri WILL make you think and I think that’s one of the highest compliments you can pay a blogger. And that’s why his blog has been in my blogroll for as long as I can remember. He is also delightfully opinionated — sometimes acerbically so.

2. You can read “Not Capulets, Not Montagus” online at the American Historical Association website.

3. For an excellent treatment of what its like on an ongoing basis to have a Civil War website project, I highly recommend Behind Antietam on the Web written by Brian Downey.

A.P. Hill Project

I am currently working on a project for And Then A.P. Hill Came Up. I am in the process of reorganizing the “Officers” section of the website — I think that was the biggest mess on the site. Rather than have long lists by division, I’ve rebroken down the information into brigades. And I am trying to add a little bit of history to each brigade plus a picture of its commander. Its not going real quick, what with being sick and trying to work still and all, but I’m getting there.

If the nausea from the Hodge doesn’t kill me first, I am going to Gettysburg for a couple days this weekend with my parents. I’ll be uploading the pictures I take as usual to my homepage, goellnitz dot org.