Civil War On This Day

Hopefully there are some baseball fans among the followers here. You’re all welcome over at the newsletter, which is free right now. For those who aren’t baseball fans, thanks for you patience in reading this far as I plug my new gig.

For now, I don’t intend to start posting here again, but I did want to provide a more expansive update since so many of you sent notes asking why I was stepping away. For anyone interested, I do write a daily newsletter on baseball history at Substack. pauldwhite.substack.com

So I wrote the book and shipped it off to the publisher in January. We settled on a title and cover a few weeks back. Like I said, it’s not about the Civil War, but it is a work of history. Specifically, the history of how the Baseball Hall of Fame has handled the Negro Leagues.

It was an easy choice since I wasn’t getting paid for this gig and don’t care to buy into the new pay-for-visibility model instituted by Twitter/X. Plus, there are only so many Civil War events and people that could be covered in this daily format and I’d been repeating myself.

Hi All. Long time no see. I wanted to let you know that the reason I stepped away from this account last year was because I was prepping to write a book. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Civil War, unless the fiction about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball qualifies. 🧵

Doing the research for the book, and working a full-time job, and writing multiple lengthy daily threads here was simply too time consuming. When I was getting ready to start the actual writing I knew something had to go, so I stopped posting here.

And that’s all folks, it’s time to move on. This account doesn’t really fit on Twitter anymore, so we’re going to march away on the anniversary of the Grand Review of the Armies. Seems fitting. Thank you all for following.

The Grand Review of the Armies concluded #OTD in 1865 in Washington, DC. Begun the day before when the Army of the Potomac marched in review, it ended with The Army of the West marching through the streets for thousands of spectators celebrating the end of the #CivilWar.

Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, commanding officer of the 11th NY Infantry “Fire Zouaves”, comprised of men recruited from New York City’s volunteer fire companies, was killed #OTD in 1861. He was 24 years old, and the first @USArmy officer killed during the #CivilWar.🧵