Friday, June 16, 2006

TOCs at LOC and other observations (updated)

Presumably, like many people, I often run across mention of interesting sounding books (mostly pre-Internet era publications) in notes and bibliographies of which little can be found in the way of content information online. One of my big complaints about publishing websites is they provide prospective buyers with very little information about their books. At the very least, I like to glance through a table of contents as it gives me some idea of the scope of the book, how many pages are devoted to some major theme or subject of interest, etc. Amazon helps with this for large numbers of more recent books, but, in several instances, I've found the basic search function of the Library of Congress site to be of great help when seeking information about some older, more obscure CW books. It's very hit and miss, but a detailed table of contents is available for many books from the LOC's online catalog.

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On the subject of fanciful Civil War backstories in t.v. series, I'm not sure if Dimitri was being facetious when he was wondering if John Brown committed any massacres in Kansas. If you define the term 'massacre' in a loosely inclusive way, I guess the answer is yes. The infamous "Pottawatomie (Creek) Massacre" in Kansas left four unarmed settlers dead. (Dimitri: by the way, in the Maverick episode, was the murdered family perchance named Doyle, Sherman, or Wilkinson?)

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Regular readers know how much I like Ironclad's Discovering Civil War America series. I just noticed that volume 4 "The Battle Between the Farmlanes: Hancock Saves the Union Center; Gettysburg, July 2, 1863" (by David Shultz and David Wieck) is available for pre-order at a discount.

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I received in the mail the final installment of David Detzer's trilogy dealing with the first 100 days of the Civil War. Look for a review of "Dissonance" here sometime over the next couple weeks.

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Laurie over at Civil War Interactive has started a new weekly feature TWIB: This Week in the Blogs: A Weekly Guide to Civil War Blogs. It is scheduled to be updated each Thursday afternoon ... friendly hint for next issue: it's Drew not Andy :-). Thanks to everyone at CWI for striving to direct more readers to the various Civil War blogs.

2 comments:

  1. Drew,

    Thanks for noticing and for pointing this out.

    At this point, we're just waiting for the Library of Congress to provide us with the cataloguing-in-process information, and then it's ready to go to the printer. They take their sweet time there, and there's not much we can do about it.

    I think you're really going to like this entry into the series.

    Eric

    ReplyDelete
  2. Drew,

    I'd like to thank you for mentioning The Battle Between the Farmlanes. as well. I preordered it today.

    Brett

    ReplyDelete

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