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"My favorite is American Symbols. I like how you show what the Statue of Liberty stands for." Bennett, South Carolina fifth-grader |
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Posts Tagged ‘Civil War’
Battle of Bentonville, NC
Written on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 [permanent link]
My son Truman and I watch Confederates after the battle.
In March 2010 my sons and I did our first overnight Civil War reenactment. The first big battle of this year had gorgeous weather and a good location, so it drew thousands of reenactors from as far away as Maine and Florida, and I got a good feel for some of the history I’ll be drawing soon for the 150th anniversary of the war.
Samuel and Truman and I have camped for years with the Boy Scouts. For the Civil War reenacting, it was fun to be in a campsite with no Coleman stoves — cooking over an open fire the way I did when I was a teenager in Boy Scouts back in the distant 1980s. There were so many campfires that by Saturday night the NC woods were thick with blue smoke — I had to go out onto an open field to clear my eyes. Now THAT’S getting a feel for history!
At Civil War events I portray a freelance cartoonist who draws battlefield scenes for the New York papers and magazines — not too big a stretch for me! The Battle of Bentonville was so big that it had a great diversity of reenactors. I mixed in with many women and children in period clothing, and near the sutlers row was a mobile blacksmith! I was fascinated to see him work out of this cart. That must have been a vital skill to bring along with an army, which would have needed frequent repairs to equipment.
The Battle of Bentonville lasted three days in March 1865, just a few weeks before Lee’s surrender to Grant in Virginia. Bentonville was the Confederate attempt to stop Gen. William T. Sherman from getting to Grant to help surround Lee — and the Confederates succeeded, but by the end of the three days Sherman still had about 90,000 men on the field and the Confederates had only about 20,000. Everyone knew the end of the war was near. Sherman was criticized for not attacking harder on the third day of fighting, to completely smash the army opposing him, but Sherman didn’t want further bloodshed.
The Civil War tactic of lining men up shoulder-to-shoulder and blasting away from just a few hundred feet was butchery. The reenactment gave me a good feel for that — and it’s hard for me to watch it even when the men are shooting just gunpowder without projectiles.
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, Civil War, graphic novel, history
Posted in Author's Purpose, Civil War, Historical Travel | No Comments »
New Teachers Guides are here!
Written on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 [permanent link]The teachers guide for the Moving and Grooving comic book about transportation is now on the website! You can find it by clicking the blue button on the homepage that says “Free Teachers Guides” or by going to the section that has sample pages for all the books (if it’s available online, the teachers guide for each book is through a link at the bottom of the list of page titles). Please let me know what you think of it. For future guides, I’d love to know what is most helpful to the education you practice and what other features you’d like to add to Chester Comix teachers guides.
The teachers guides for Civil War vol. 1 and Civil War vol. 2 are also here now. I’ve finished handing out the printed versions of those, so now you can get all those activities, literacy lessons and quizzes in the free .pdf file for them posted in the Free Teachers Guides section. As I run through the printed guides, I’ll make that content available here as a free download!
And in a few weeks I’ll have a teachers guide up for this month’s new comic, “Revolutionary City.” Stay tuned!
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, Civil War, classroom activity, history education, literacy lesson, practice quiz, teachers guide, transportation
Posted in History Teacher | 2 Comments »
Book Review: Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails by Tom Wheeler
Written on Friday, August 29th, 2008 [permanent link]
I enjoyed all the comparisons between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln made at the Democratic National Convention this week. If anything, Lincoln was LESS experienced at the time of his election than Obama is now: Lincoln had only one 2-year term in the House of Representatives and was a complete dark horse candidate at the Republican convention in the summer of 1860 and a shock to the East Coast establishment when he got the nomination.
Get ready for a lot more Lincoln – next year is the bicentennial of his birth, and a nationwide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will also gear up next year. There’s going to be a lot of blue and gray around, and I’m preparing to do a comic entirely on Honest Abe!
As research for that, I just finished reading Tom Wheeler’s “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails.” Wheeler’s thesis is a fine one — that Abraham Lincoln’s use of the new technology of the telegraph mirrors our own experience with the new form of communication we call e-mail — but this book reads more like a long piece in the New Yorker than a book. He repeats his thesis over and over rather than to push his analysis into secondary or tertiary levels of description of how lightning-fast communication could be manipulated for the sender’s purpose. A decade into the e-mail practice, we all know now how e-mail can be used or NOT used to get a point across to friends, co-workers, bosses or others. There are glimmers of this kind of analysis in Wheeler’s book – such as when he notes Lincoln’s own perceptive view that a telegraph message ranked below a handwritten letter and far below face-to-face talking in its effectiveness. That hierarchy of human communication still exists today!
But more often Wheeler’s book is a simple review of the events of the Civil War. And a great reminder of what a jerk Union General George McClellan was! This is a fast read that could have moved a little more slowly than the speed of Morse code.
FUN PASSAGE:
“It might be argued that the telegraph’s intrusion had sapped (General) Hooker of his authority. Clearly he was frustrated, observing to a fellow general that dealing with Lee ‘had occupied two hours of his time each day, Washington had required the remainder.'”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, Civil War, history, telegraph
Posted in Civil War, History Book Review | No Comments »
