An Unusual Addition to My Blog-Roll

All of the blogs on my blog listing up until this morning have belonged to people I know in real life, mostly friends from school or people I've come to know relatively recently.

"A Slightly Odd View of the the American Civil War" belongs to a member of my message board whose handle is 67th Tigers.  He takes a revisionist view of Union General George McClellan, defending him when most people criticize him.

(The orthodox view of McClellan is that he was overly cautious and erroneously believed the Confederates outnumbered him at critical points.  67th Tigers compares McClellan favorably to Grant, although I have not examined his arguments closely enough to deduce why.)

History is a science and therefore one should be ready to overturn old paradigms based on new data, but I tend to be leery of revisionist views in general due to the typical presence of a political axe to grind.

For example, the "revisionist" view of the Cold War became popular during and after the Vietnam War and was largely held by opponents of the war (and people opposed to US prosecution of the Cold War in general).  It seems to me that people took their conclusion (Vietnam War and anti-Communism, bad) and tried to fit the facts to the paradigm rather than basing their paradigm on facts.

However, 67th Tigers does have a whole lot interesting data on his blog concerning troop numbers, when particular units opened fire in particular battles, casualty ratios, etc.  Considering how my novel Escape from the Wastelands is roughly at a Civil War tech level (the exceptions being airships and the occasional pre-apocalyptic "Old World" weaponry), it would be prudent to have this resource available for research on the battle sequences.

Plus, maybe some of my blog-readers are Civil War enthusiasts.