This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,303) on Friday, July 16, 2021. This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,313) on Friday, July 16, 2021. More and more, the sentiment showing in mainstream news outlets is that online learning during our year of Covid was a bust • Read More »
If your emotions we’re caught up in the swirl surrounding Meghan and Harry . . . If your feelings were buffeted by the off-again on-again relationship of J.Lo and A-Rod . . . Then you should have been alive in the 1870s when public domestic squabbles were very good. A few weeks ago in this • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,374) on Friday, April 23, 2021. The ongoing fight to make public records public traditionally has been led by state press associations and independent members of the news media. As such, it has been viewed by state legislators and the public at large as self-serving. • Read More »
To look at Thaddeus Stevens’ picture, you don’t see a political hero. You see a rough face perched on an unusually large and protruding lower lip. He appears to have a permanent frown etched on his visage, like he hasn’t enjoyed a joke since he was about six years old. Stevens was played masterfully by • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, November 13, 2020. Some people cook and bake. Some people collect. Some make things. Some draw and paint, some listen (to music, etc.), some watch (birds, airplanes, insects, old movies, etc.), some read. The list could go on and on, of course. • Read More »
William Seward’s modern biographer, Walter Stahr, subtitled his excellent book, “Lincoln’s Indispensable Man.” That sobriquet is hard to argue with when you examine how the Lincoln Administration navigated through the shoals of secession and the fierce opposition of the unionist Democrats. There was no guarantee that Lincoln, Seward, and the Republicans would prevail. But Seward • Read More »
Despite the fact that one of America’s great accomplishments of the 19th century was the ultimate abolition of slavery, racial attitudes did not advance toward accepting racial equality at all. By the end of the century, the nation had wrapped itself into the knots of Jim Crow laws that embedded segregation into just about every • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, July 17, 2020. The world gets crazier and the pandemic, in America, gets worse. My heart is with those who have to make difficult decisions, from sending their kids to school to ordering businesses to shut down. I pray for their • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, May 22, 2020. This summer is likely to turn into my Wolf Hall summer. I have waited too long to dive into Hilary Mantel’s widely-acclaimed trilogy of historical fiction about the life of Thomas Cromwell. Mantel published the third volume of the trilogy (The • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,775) on Friday, June 14, 2019. Beans on the stand, tassels on the corn, blooms on the cucumbers, tomatoes on the vine — the garden continues to amaze us with its seasonable miracles. The months of planning, planting, watering, weeding, and watching are being • Read More »
As a writing teacher of several decades, I never cared for the advice “write like you talk.” Most people don’t talk all that well. Besides, writing is a different process from talking. Talking is easy. Writing is hard. But “write like you talk” was the advice that Ulysses S. Grant got from Robert S. Johnson, • Read More »
This newsletter was emailed to everyone on Jim’s email list (3,251) on July 27, 2018 The summer is fully upon us here in East Tennessee — heat, humidity, and tomatoes. We always plant far more tomato plants than we need, and we are always surprised, with a bit of mock-horror thrown in, at how • Read More »
The battle of Shiloh during two April days in 1862 proved to William Tecumseh Sherman that he could be what he always wanted to be – a success. See Two failures who save each other – and then saved the nation (part 1). Sherman had not been successful at very much during his adult life. • Read More »
Well into his adult life, Cump Sherman considered himself a failure. So did others. He had attended West Point and had accomplished some relative successes in his military career. But when he left the army, he proceeded to fail at everything he tried. His health — he suffered from asthma — and his mental stability were • Read More »
Jim Stovall’s email newsletter for July 14, 2017 Hi there, I hope you’ve had a good week and are looking forward to the weekend. Reviews Writers always want people to read their books, and they want their readers to love what they read. But what the writer needs is honesty. That’s why I alway suggest • Read More »
Once again, we are sharing a post with the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable. Note: The annual anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg is this weekend. To commemorate that, we are posting, with permission, excerpts from Battlelines: Gettysburg, that describe aspects of the battle. Battlelines: Gettysburg contains the battlefield drawings of Alfred Waud and Edwin Forbes, • Read More »
Gettysburg is so iconic — particularly because of the Gettysburg Address that Abraham Lincoln delivered four months after the battle — that we tend to lose sight of what it meant to the people who lived during the war.
Historian Brian McKnight, professor at the University of Virginia-Wise, told the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable on Tuesday that partisan fighter and Confederate outlaw Champ Ferguson was a man who saw the world as “black or white.”
The 19th century was just as image conscious as our age, and one of the masters of image was Abraham Lincoln. The sidebar on page 389 of Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How tells about a famous photo of Lincoln that was used in the election campaign of 1860.
Many rare and never-before-published drawings of Civil War sketch artists are now available in Battlelines: Gettysburg, newly released by First Inning Press.