On to Watauga

A few days ago, I finished up the North Carolina Remembers Chancellorsville project, and sent it off to the publisher. The book contains forty-four first-hand accounts written by Tar Heels soldiers who fought at the battle of Chancellorsville. I'm really looking forward to this project's being released.

So what's next? A few months back, I signed a contract with the History press to write a book about Watauga County and the Civil War. This is a project that I have been working on for close to eighteen years. The book will cover the war years, but will have something a little different. There will be a chapter looking at the experiences of Watauga County soldiers who marched away to fight in the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee. You might consider it a mini version of Wiley's The Life of Johnny Reb, but only using sources from Watauga County and thus specifically covering the experiences of these men. I have maybe a dozen letter sets, written by men from Watauga County while they were in the army. I'll probably add a few post-war stories as well. Couple this with some statistical data (which we did not get in Johnny Reb), and well, this is going where no one has gone before. At least I think it is.

Well, I guess I need to go back to work, crunching those statistical numbers to include in the text.