So what Andrew Ferguson calls the Chump Effect, i.e. reporters taking any old social science “development” at face value, was more often my attempt to stay employed while waiting for a better story to come along.

Editors were, more or less, in the same fix. Making us easy targets for analysts like AF. But what did we care? Pay checks came once a week and, like Ms. O’Hara so wisely put it, tomorrow was another day.

“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they [our blessings] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

“And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

Via Lint In My Pocket – Artillery On The Ridge

She carried with her an antique silver syrup pitcher belonging to her Civil War ancestor, Private Jonathan James McDaniel, and posed it at different sites.

Here, the pitcher sits on the business end of a 20-pounder Parrott gun, a rifled cannon used mainly by the Union,  near the Henry House on the Manassas Battlefield in Virginia.

Jo has written a novel about McDaniel, available for free reading here. My own blog saga of the 13th Regiment continues into late July, 1863, here.

Much as I liked Cain, his behavior here is despicable. Could it be Mr. Pizza actually is, in fact, just another Democrat water boy in disguise?

Not because I used to spend time there in 1970-71 when I was an Army recruiter and recruiting headquarters was then at Monroe. Nope.

But because, well, among its other historical aspects, the fort that was built when USA was a new republic has the cell where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the Civil War.

It was also horror writer and poet Edgar Allen Poe’s home when he was an Army artillery sergeant in the early 1800s. There’s just too much history there to let some developer turn it into beachfront condos.

Via To The Sound of the Guns.

Finally, back in the mid-1980s, the print was replaced with this one from participant descriptions of the actual scene and it began to be sold in National Park Service bookstores. It helps explain why North-South animosity endured for more than a hundred years after the war.

Chamberlain, of course, was one of the heroes of Gettysburg, the following July. The stand (and concluding charge) of his Twentieth Maine Infantry Regiment on Little Round Top has long been called key to the 1863 Union victory.

Kershaw’s Brigade of South Carolinians held the sunken road on Marye’s Heights at Fredricksburg in December, 1862, stopping multiple Union charges until the battlefield was littered with Union dying and dead.

Harry Smeltzer: Living Monuments

Bernie: Should Putting Women on a Leash Be Legal?

Zombie: Mohammed Image Archive

J-Lem Post: What to do with lemons like Thomas Friedman

Bernie, again: Gross Muslim Jokes

Amazon: Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle

Knoxville 1863: Civil War Flapdoodle