Books, books, and more books.

Well, I wish I had an announcement regarding my book on the 58th NCT, but I don’t, so we will skip to more exciting news.

I’ve gotten two contracts for new projects, one about finished, and one a long way from being finished.

The first is for a book that I’ve been working on most of the year. It is tentatively entitled North Carolina Remembers Gettysburg. It is a collection of seventy-seven first-person accounts on the July 1863 battle, all of which were written by Tar Heels and appeared in Tar Heel newspapers between July 1863 and the turn of the twentieth century. This book will be published by Ten Roads Publishing out of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and should be available later this year. I said that I’ve been working on it for most of the year; I actually started collecting the material when I started working on my book on the 37th NCT.

The second contract is for a book to be published by the History Press out of Charleston, South Carolina. It is for a work tentatively titled ­Civil War North Carolina. It will be a concise history of the Tar Heel state and the war. It will different from Barrett’s work from the 1960s in several different ways: it will have chapters that deal with reconstruction and remembrance, and will have three times the illustrations. I’m really looking forward to this, but it will entail some hard work: There are events that Barrett devoted whole chapters to that I will need to condense to a few paragraphs. This should be a good challenge and I am looking forward to it.

Lastly, I’ve slowly been working on cataloging my collection of Civil War book on an online site called librarything.com I’ve enjoyed this little diversion, and I’ve gotten to thumb through some old favorites that I’ve not really spent much time with since finishing the work on the 37th NCT. As C. S. Lewis once said, old books are like old friends. Let me encourage you to follow along with my progress at http://www.librarything.com/profile/mchardy

Well, I guess that is enough excitement for one week. Sorry about the lack of posts. My son has been attending a day camp at ASU this week and after dropping him off, I’ve been working in the library on both projects.