A Personal Note a Week Before the Storm

Dear Subscribers and Readers of “Dedicated to the Proposition that All Men are Created Equal”

Before the Category Six Storm of Trump 2.0 begins just a week from now, I wanted to take a few minutes to update you on a couple of things that are personal to me, but might also be important to you.

First I want you to know that my agent is beginning to seek a publisher for my second book, A Great Civil War in an Age of Revolutionary Change. Like my first book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond, it began as an introductory chapter to my Gettysburg Staff Ride text. I began that work in late 2013 when I became part of the faculty of the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. While I was the Chaplain and taught Ethics there, the assignment allowed me to return to the academic world as a historian, which was one of my dreams in college.

I thought that this book would be my first, but my agent, Roger Williams pushed me to work on Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory first. He was correct on both a professional and personal perspective. From a professional standpoint it helped build my credibility as a something more than a military historian, and as a man committed fighting racism as well as to civil rights for everyone. From a personal perspective it made me more aware of the continuing struggle of African Americans, other racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+, and religious minorities, and the systemic injustices that most face in some way.

A Great Civil War in an Age of Revolutionary Change focuses on aspects of the American Civil War that are part of the thinking of senior military leaders, diplomats, and strategists deal with every day. Those topics are basically part of what strategists call the DIME, the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic aspects of national security. But it goes beyond that, in that it examines the technological advances, to include weaponry, sociological factors including emancipation, and the role of women in society and the military, and the role of immigrants in fighting the war. Every single one of these issues involve things far greater than warfighting itself, national security and defense policy are greater than waging war, and all of them contribute to waging successful diplomatic and if need be, military campaigns. So the book deals with Civil War history, as well as lessons learned from it which are applicable today.

The draft is already written, but I haven’t touched in since 2017, though I have browsed through it to figure out necessary changes to it. During the process I will likely publish excepts from the current draft text, just to tweak your interest.

Second, I invite anyone who reads my work to invest just $5 a month or $50 a year to support my work here. My articles take a lot of time and effort to write as I teach four high school history classes, and restart my classes for my Doctor of Strategic Leadership program in March. I had to take time off in October after my wife came close to dying from a burst appendix that was only discovered after a routine doctor’s appointment where her doctor found she was in A-Fib and sent her to the ER. When she mentioned the pain she had been suffering and she was given a CT scan, which led to a five hour long emergency surgery and a two week hospital stay. The surgeon said that if she had waited a day longer, she would have died from sepsis. Your contribution to my work on this site helps more than you can imagine. It may not be much, but it helps.

New yearly subscribers, or current monthly subscribers who upgrades to being yearly or founding member will receive an inscribed copy of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.

Thank you for everything, stay safe and all the best.