I’m an anomaly amongst Civil War buffs in that I’m Canadian, and I’m also a girl. (You should’ve seen the shocked expressions of my fellow Round Tablers when I first spoke up in discussion!)
I came to the war early, sucked in as a 9 year old when The Blue and the Gray was aired. From then on, all our family vacations to the Sunny South’s beaches involved a stop or two at graveyards or battlefields for me. With the decline of the Canadian dollar, though, our trips stopped at the border, and since then I’ve been resigned to reading and researching to slake my thirst for Civil War knowledge.
Thanks to the advent of the Internet, such reading and research has become very easy and very engaging. One of the pages I’ve created is a catalogue of resources – most free – available for students of the war. With this site, I hope to engage others in conversation and offer my own take on some of the war’s salient happenings. Stay tuned for the Civil War Podcast – coming in the sesquicentennial year(s)!
I was a history major at the University of Toronto, where I once served a year as a for-credit Research Assistant to Professor Kenneth R. Bartlett – still a “career” highlight. The good professor had our team preparing footnotes for a book he was preparing, and I greatly enjoyed the researching and writing of these small biographies and narratives. My short attention span appreciates both the preparation and the consumption of survey histories, and that’s what I plan to present with my podcast.