100 Posts!

I've been blogging for almost 1 year, and this marks my 100th post. This seems like an appropriate time to step back for a moment and consider the big picture.

I'm not a historian, but I have been reading and reflecting on the Revolution for many years now, and this blog is a way for me to organize my thoughts on different topics and share them with others.

The first topic I chose to wrote about was the battle of Cowpens, and my initial posts on that subject were devoted to very specific topics concerning that battle: the military units involved, how the soldiers were arrayed, and the sequencing of different events during the battle -- even who John Savage shot. Eventually, I became disenchanted with this scattershot approach and elected to present a 25-post sequence that described, step-by-step, how I believe the battle was fought. I don't know if I was exactly trying to convince anybody that my original ideas were right -- I haven't made more than minimal efforts to call attention to this blog. Mainly it's that I like turning my ideas into something tangible. It's not impossible that I will eventually use this rough material as a starting point for a book. (However, writing one would entail a great deal more time and effort than I'm willing to expend in the foreseeable future). And if not, well, perhaps someone who is writing on these topics will find food for thought here.

On the whole I liked the way the Cowpens project turned out, although I did have some reservations, and I realized later there were other things I could have or should have said. Eventually, deciding to leave well enough alone, I embarked on a different project: Thomas Sumter's initial partisan campaign against British forces in South Carolina. I intended for this project to be modest in scale, but here it is 6 months later, and I'm still posting on the subject. I don't expect to wrap things up until the end of April.

I've continued to grow more concerned about organization and presentation, and so I put together a kind of master post for my Sumter project, with links to all of the posts so far, and an indication of everything that is yet upcoming. This master post may yet undergo some editing, because I sometimes change my mind about exactly what it is I want to say, but tentatively I plan on posting on the Loyalist Prince of Wales American Regiment later this month, and then about the battle of Hanging Rock throughout January, February, and March. I will wrap up the Sumter project with a treatment of the battle of Fishing Creek in April. I've been looking forward to writing about Hanging Rock for some time -- it is possibly the largest, bloodiest, and most dramatic battle in the 13 colonies to be largely ignored by historians.

One other thing I'll be doing is working to further improve the organization around here. Very likely, I will go back and impose some more order on my Cowpens project before the end of the month.

So what will I be once the Sumter project is complete? Again, all plans are tentative, but I can say that I am strongly inclined to write for awhile about the American invasion of Canada in 1775, and specifically the campaign to subdue the British fort at St Johns and capture the town of Montreal. I've done a fair amount of reading on this subject, and I've found the surviving letters and journals from that time (I've been reading transcriptions, of course) to be fairly riveting. What happens after that is an open question.

Which topics I take up are limited by my background knowledge and by the miniatures I own and/or am able to paint. With that said, if you have a "wish list" of topics you would like to see me write about, please leave a comment. I'm very interested in your opinion.

As a look back, below are some pics from the Cowpens project, which I haven't posted before. Each of these images depicts the "main line" fighting. Click to enlarge.