News and notes (and thoughts)

I saw this morning in the Asheville Citizen-Times that the Southern Appalachian Nature Conservatory is helping save more land next to the Vance Birthplace in Buncombe County. Three cheers and a tiger for the Conservatory. You can read the article here.

Metro Magazine has an interesting article on the origins and history of Durham. You can find the article here.

There was an article in the Tulsa World about Capt. James T. Roseborough of the 6th North Carolina Troops. The article can be found here.

The Asheville Citizen-Times also ran an article about a new book on the 25th North Carolina Troops, released recently by McFarland and Company. The 25th NCT was mostly a western North Carolina regiment. You can learn more by checking out the article here.

Also, I received the latest issue of America’s Civil War a couple of days ago. There are a couple of Tar Heel mentions. In one piece, Harry Smeltzer, from the Bull Runnings blog, picks six books off his shelf and “ranks ’em” One of the books that he picks is Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. This book, which Smeltzer likes, is a history of the Shelton Laurel Massacre, which took place in Madison County in 1863. A page over, Gordon Berg reviews the 2003 film Cold Mountain. Berg has two interesting quotations about the movie. The first is from Gary Gallagher “Cold Mountain can best be understood as a feminist antiwar film that turns almost every Lost Cause convention on its head.” I could go with that. It isn't that the events didn't happen. All of the horrible things in the book and movie of Cold Mountain happened (and were chronicled in other books, which Charles Fraiser used liberally without much credit to their authors), but several are skewed (like Inman's fate) for dramatic reasons. The second quote is this: “As local historian John C. Inscoe recently wrote ‘Cold Mountain´ indeed depicts a war and a people that [Rovert E.] Lee would probably would not have recognized; neither gods not generals play much of a role here.” Hmmm, Berg has relegated the eminent John C. Inscoe, Professor of History at the University of Georgia, to the role of a “local historian.” Wow, I’m now in good company, and I don’t even have a Ph.D!

I wrote all of that to tie this in. There is a review of a new book by Steven Woodworth entitled Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West. According to the review (also by Gordon Berg), the books is a 138 page “supersonic” view of the war in the Western Theater. Having spent a lot of time recently in the Western Theater of the war, we really don’t need a new overview. What we need is a set of books that explores those battles from February 1864, through, say October 1864. A good set of books, like Gordon Rhea’s tomes on the Overland Campaign, on battles like Dalton, Reseca, New Hope Church, Dallas, etc.

Ok, enough of a rant. I’m going to work on the 58th NCT book. They are just about to line up in the streets of Columbia, South Carolina.