Kojo Nnamdi Show

It turns out Dad and I are scheduled to be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU-FM, a very big local Washington radio show. We’re scheduled for 12:00 to 12:30 on Monday, February 23. It ought to be a lot of fun.

Data Security Interview

I just completed a brief interview with the good people at http://www.datasecuritypodcast.com, all about how both sides used encryption to protect their telegraph messages. Fun stuff.

Fine-tuning a few features

I am still getting the hang of setting things up for this web log. I have switched to a new design them which seems a lot more legible. Tomorrow is another interview, and there’s an interesting event next weekend. And another very positive review came in — I’ll post it tonight or tomorrow. In short, so far, the book seems to be very well received.

I’ll be breaking off from support of book promotion for a bit while I do a work prepping an appendix for Dad’s new book on the Loyalists in the Revolutionary War.

Bayonet Wounds — Correcting an error

I mis-stated a statistic on one of my radio interviews yesterday, and I wanted to put it right. I said that there were fewer that 100 reported bayonets wounds during the Civil War. I need to dig a bit deeper to pull up the full statistic, but the actual number is fewer than 1,000 — 944 bayonet wounds — about four tenths of one percent of the total wounds reported. This is one of those falsely-precise numbers, of course. There must have been more wounds than this that weren’t reported, and there were likely many killed by bayonets without anyone bothering to note the cause of death when the dead were cleared from the battlefield. The sources I have dug up so far don’t make it clear if this is the number for both sides, or merely the Union army. (I believe it is both sides, but I’ll have to check.)

All that being said, however, the main point I was trying to make holds true — there were remarkably few bayonet wounds in the war. That is not to say the bayonet was useless — seeing an army’s worth of sharp steel blades marching toward you — or charging toward you — couldn’t have been good for morale. The bayonet also made an excellent all-purpose tool for cutting, digging, prying things open, and so on.

Roger

A New Review

The day of interviews was capped with another very nice review of the book — an AP roundup of books about Lincoln for kids. See http://mrlincolnshightechwar.com/reviews.html for what people have had to say so far.