Listing to Starboard

The Fool on the Hill…or at the White House

Earl B. McElfresh — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:33:05 +0000

So Sir Paul McCartney disses George W. Bush.

Where was the fool-on the hill or at the White House.

Some Personal Favorites

Earl B. McElfresh — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:27:42 +0000

Our son was being interviewed and happened to mention that his father was a cartographer and Civil War map historian. The interviewer was a young guy just entering on a professional career and he had a bit of time on his hands for the first time since graduate school began. He had an interest in American history and asked me if I could make some suggestions about things to read. I told him I’d sit down and come up with a reading list of ten books to start with. This is what I sent him…

This was hard! I restricted myself to American history and being essentially military history oriented, esp. Civil War, the list is a bit top heavy with those topics. These are all books that I loved to read, have read more than once, and plan to live long enough to read again.There is no ranking within the list itself. So here goes:

The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (popular but gripping account of D-Day)
Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell (a rambling but fascinating history of George Armstrong Custer)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Conrad Black (best biography of our most interesting 20th C. president)
Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald (a wonderful, almost moment by moment account of a WW2 rifle company in Europe. It’s like riding with them in a Jeep. It’s not blood and gore and guts. It’s just an absorbing account of what it was like to be there)
Co. Aytch by Sam R. Watkins (ditto as above but a Confederate account of the Civil War)
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald (there are several but this is the best recent one volume biography of Lincoln)
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (he was dying of throat cancer and his family was destitute when Grant began to write. He finished the book and died three days later. It became the best-selling book of the 19th Century and earned $400,000 in royalties in those days…probably the equivalent of $100,000,000 now. Quite a guy, quite a book. If you’re ever discouraged about things, read this!)
Lincoln Finds A General by Kenneth P. Williams (four volumes but my favorite of all my Civil War books – it’s largely about Grant and the western theater of the War. This is a great set to look for in used book stores. It was published between 1949 and 1956)
Battle Cry of Freedom by James M.McPherson (the best single volume account of the Civil War. It’s part of a series by various authors in the Oxford U. Press’s Oxford History of the U.S. They’re all pretty good and they’re appearing in no particular chronological order)
The Story of the Great March by George Ward Nichols (1865 with a 1972 reprint – what it was like to be on Sherman’s staff on the March to the Sea)

There are two other books that I have to mention though they don’t fit any of the criterion I set up for this list. One is a biography, The Days of Henry Thoreau by Walter Harding. I can’t explain my attraction to it but every time I notice it on the shelf I have to resist the urge to pick it up and read it. And I’m not a particular Thoreau fan.

The other is a trilogy, the overall title being The Sword of Honor, by Evelyn Waugh, the 20th Century English novelist. It’s a fictionalized account of his own service in WW2 and I have the same problem with this book as with the Thoreau.

Give me the word and I’ll pass along some English history recommendations.

As a final recommendation, when you’re done with all of the above, see Maps and Map makers of the Civil War (Abrams 1999) by Earl B. McElfresh.

Nothing like a list

Earl B. McElfresh — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:40:57 +0000

Nothing catches my attention like a list. If somebody lists the ten most noxious plants, I will go to that list and read it.

In more practical terms, in an area of interest, if somebody creates a list of , say, the best and worst of the American Civil War, it’s not only fascinating and controversial but often helpful too. A book you’ve never heard of, a memoir you own but never read, a general you revere who gets panned or vica versa, a battle site you’ve never visited, a museum you’ve never stopped at. All of these possibilities emerge from lists. So I plan lists and lots of them. Lists of the best (or worst as the case may be) CW generals, mapmakers, maps, decisions, weapons, politicians, strategists, battles, songs, diaries, memoirs, regimental histories, sites, quotations, sites, collections, most overlooked, most underrated, most misunderstood…all in an essentially personal, very subjective way.

And occasionally off-topic lists. e.g. all the different American place names in the songs of Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan. You’re only young once but you’re only old once too.

Let us go then you and I….

Earl B. McElfresh — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:41:52 +0000

1975 I’m sitting in a shoe box sized apartment on E. 74th St. in Manhattan. No car. Haven’t been out of the City in months. NJ friend calls. Taking the family car to Gettysburg. The battlefield? Yeah.

I’m not interested in American History. It’s that generation. English History yes. Russian History yes. Never took an American History course in college. Lots of English literature. Russian literature. No American literature. As an English music publisher said in 1962, “So what’s from Liverpool?” In 1975, I thought, “So what’s from America?”

But a car was a car, a trip out of NYC was a trip out of NYC. If my pal had been headed for a chewing gum museum I would have been game. Three of us set off for Gettysburg. We arrived. Clambered around in the fresh air and sunshine. Novel stuff after months on the Avenues. There was a little sign in the woods. Something something …these rocks were piled here by Union defenders the afternoon of July 3, 1863.

I was stopped literally in my tracks. The permanence of something so transient was a shock. NYC, where permanent things, huge buildings, hotels, apartment complexes, come and go like soda cans. Somebody takes this field pretty seriously I’m thinking. Of course I knew about Pickett’s Charge, of course the Gettysburg Address. But this was American History – all huffing and puffing. None of the courtly drama of European History.

I picked up a couple of books on Gettysburg at the Park bookstore. About five years later I looked up from Civil War literature and tried to read a novel. I thought, why am I reading this made up stuff? Why does anybody? They’re somebody’s daydream. This Civil War stuff really happened. These massive personalities actually lived. Actually did these things. That rocky little wall on Little Round Top that they scrambled to erect still exists. The Civil War isn’t sullied over with the pale cast of intellectuals’ thoughts. It lives and breathes, it’s bathed in sunshine and washed with rain. It’s characters lie in gigantic monuments or in nondescript forgotten graves. But they’re there, and they were, and they matter. A lot.

I plan to talk about them. And other American things that matter. Some maybe not so much.

Coming Soon.

Earl B. McElfresh — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:15:14 +0000

Lists of interesting historical characters, issues, books, songs, flags, sights etc…