Celebrating a Birthday and Our Shared Love of History
Upgrade Today Only to a Paid Subscription at 40% Off
I’m not getting any younger folks. In fact, today I am one year older. It’s hard not to take stock and acknowledge what I am thankful for on a day like today. A loving family and wife are certainly at the top of the list.
Over the past 25 years I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to share my love of history through teaching, writing, and public speaking. My commitment to this work has never been stronger.
Since this place has allowed me to showcase my deep interest in the Civil War era and history education, I thought I would share a bit of today’s celebration with all of you in the form of a very special offer.
Please don’t read any further if you have zero interest in upgrading to a paid subscription. I know that for some of you these offers rub the wrong way.
That you spend any of your valuable time on this site is more than I could ask for. Thank you.
Still here?
FOR TODAY ONLY YOU CAN UPGRADE TO A 1-YEAR PAID SUBSCRIPTION AT 40% OFF.
Here’s what you get:
ability to post comments
ability to post your own threads in the chat room
access to the podcast
access to all video interviews
open thread Thursday
invitations to special events like the Civil War Memory book club and Office Hours.
Let me be completely transparent now that I have your attention.
I hope that the additional access to this site is worth the cost of a paid subscription alone, but your support goes even further. It has helped with the cost of researching my biography of Robert Gould Shaw as well as other projects. Ordering copies of archival materials and travel expenses can add up fast.
Even more important, your support has made it much easier for me to be able to work with teachers and students around the country through institutions that have limited budgets. Of all the ways that I have been able to share my passion for history with others, working with students and history teachers is the most important and meaningful to me.
My goal from the beginning has been to ensure that as much of this site as possible remain free. If you are satisfied with the free content, I hope you will continue to read and enjoy this newsletter.
If you have grown to love this newsletter, look forward to each post, and believe in paying people for their work, consider a paid subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and will most certainly go a long way.
Thank you.
Otis would also like to say, thank you.
If you are on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription, I can tell you that it is well worth your money. I really enjoy the interviews and the book reviews, along with the ability to interact with Kevin and the other subscribers.
My dad died eight years and a week ago on Whidbey Island in the middle of the Puget Sound and I've still got my share of his ashes, 1/6th after cremation, in a bag in a filing cabinet in a house I own on the Kitsap Peninsula, awaiting distribution to a number of final resting places for his remains. Some of his ashes belong in the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis at the site of the grave of my great great grandfather who was buried there on the 27th of July in 1865. Some of them should go to the front lawn of a house in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, built in 1890 by my great grandfather. It's being slowly restored by a second cousin of mine in Garden Grove, California, whose mother bought the place about five years ago for less than six figures. He'll eventually flip it for at least three times what my grand aunt paid for it. Indoor plumbing was still considered an extravagance one hundred and thirty years ago. Some of the ashes will go to Pinnacle Mountain in Little Rock, Arkansas, some to Algiers across the river from the French Quarter in New Orleans and some to what remains of the walls of Spanish Fort just across the mouth of the Alabama River from Mobile. Some will go to Boca Chica, Texas, on the island of Brazos Santiago at the mouth of the Rio Grande, where Elon Musk test fires his SpaceX rockets until they stop exploding. I'll also save some ashes for a little gothic fieldstone church in the Kettle Moraine near Kewaskum, Wisconsin, not far from Sheboygan. And I'll take what's left to Zehden on the Polish side of the Oder or Odra River. The Poles call the town Cedynia. It's a big marsh and nature preserve for migratory birds where my great great grandparents were married in 1852 four years before they sailed from Hamburg to Castle Garden in New York enroute to Wisconsin. It's where the Polish monarchy won their equivalent of the Battle of Hastings. It's where the Red Army forded the Oder on their way to Berlin in 1945 and it's where the Finow Canal has connected the Oder to the Havel on the west side of Berlin since the time of Frederick the Great and the reason Potsdam has a mothballed navy base next to the Schloss Sanssouci. My guess is that's where Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last King of Prussia, moored his yacht, the one he used to visit nearly every town on every fjord in Norway every summer. When Kevin started Civil War Memory on Blogspot I didn't know I had a Civil War ancestor and neither did my dad. I think assimilation is the word used to describe that phenomenon and the reason my dad considered himself a phenomenologist. I was raised on Being and Nothingness which is French for Heidegger and Husserl.