This month’s BGES Member Making a Difference features Brian Mattingly, who is also a member of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation (SVBF). Brian has commissioned artist Keith Rocco to depict a lesser-known aspect of the Battle of New Market, which features the VMI cadets manning two artillery pieces. A limited-edition canvas of the painting will be … Read more
Articles of War: Winners, Losers, and Some Who Were Both in the Civil War By Albert Castel (Stackpole Books, 2001, 244 pages) With a personal library of more than 5,000 books, I have more books than I will ever read in my life. And so, in selecting “unread” books, I went to my various … Read more
In the retelling of the Civil War, Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas pales in the shadows of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and other famous leaders, and yet this mighty Union general played a pivotal role in shaping the war west of the Appalachians. Born into a slave-holding Virginia family, Thomas attended West Point, … Read more
The Road to Appomattox By Bell Irvin Wiley (Memphis State College Press, 1956) A legend in the Civil War historical community, Bell Wiley was noted for his two seminal studies of the common soldiers of the Confederacy and Union: The Life of Johnny Reb was published in 1943 in the midst of World War 2, and The … Read more
When it comes to history, Bill Davies has lived a life of it. Through the years, the South Carolinian native and former attorney has delved into general military history, European history, as well as Asian and colonial African history—though he is most profoundly interested in South Carolina history, especially as it relates to the Revolutionary … Read more
Parker Hills is an expert when it comes to military strategy. The Mississippi native and graduate of the U.S. Army War College served more than 30 years in the U.S. Army, retiring as brigadier general in 2001. He owns Battle Focus, a leadership training company that trains soldiers, airmen, and Marines, as well as corporate … Read more
When the BGES completed The Civil War, A Traveler’s Guide with the National Geographic Society in 2016, it marked the fourth successful full-length book project to go along with 19 scholarly monographs as part of the body of BGES’s published intellectual works. We immediately opened discussions with Nat Geo for a fifth book, on the … Read more
And suddenly it is 2022. As BGES winds down its 28th year of operations (in April 2022), we have seen a stunning reversal of fortunes, with membership growing and members digging a little deeper to show their appreciation for all that BGES does for education and preservation and to ensure we have the resources to … Read more
A year-long, $35,000 effort is winding down for 2021 just a little short of the finish line, but nonetheless robust in its achievements. Working with Lincoln Archives founder and Documents on Wheels proprietor, Karen Needles, we have converted raw video never intended for this end to digital files and brought them to the BGES website. … Read more
Storm Over the Land: A Profile of the Civil War By Carl Sandburg (Mariner Books, 2000; originally published 1939) In our current assault on American history, it is often useful to reflect back on how war was treated in our past. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and historian Carl Sandburg presents us with one such prism with … Read more
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