My Civil War Connection

 

 

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Fall Conference of the New Mexico Council of Social Studies.  The theme of the conference was The Civil War in New Mexico, and my talk was on how to help students with limited English or low reading skills understand what they were reading about.

I began my talk with a story about something that had happened in my class a couple of weeks ago.  One of my students had brought in some money and wanted to buy my Civil War novel, The Bent Reed.  When I signed a copy for her and set it on her desk, the student sitting next to her looked over at it. 

"What's this?" he asked.
"It's a book," I said, stating the obvious.  He studied the bookcover a little longer, then pointed to my name.
"Did you write it?" he asked.  When I told him yes, he looked at the cover some more before asking what the book was about.  I told him the Civil War and his gaze shot up to my face.
"Were you there?" he asked with a surprised gasp.

So I have an admission for any of my fans that I've led astray; I was not an eyewitness at the Battle of Gettysburg.  I am not, like I claimed yesterday, a two hundred year old Social Studies teacher.

But even though I wasn't there, I do have a Civil War connection.

The man in the picture is not it.  He is Ken Dusenberry, a Corporal in the Artillery Company of New Mexico and a very interesting man to talk with. Ken knows a lot about the life and times of the Civil War soldier and can tell you more about ammunition and "grub" than just about anyone alive.  But much as he would like to have been around at the time of the Civil War, he was not.

My Civil War connection is my great grandfather, Selwin Clark Linnell.  Born on May 6, 1848 in Rockford, Illinois, Selwin enlisted as a private in Company K of the 132nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry one month before his 16th birthday.  According to the geneology site on which I found this information, he served for 100 days in the campaign of General Sherman, and then was honorably discharged.  I have a framed copy of his discharge papers hanging in my house.  The family lore has always been that he was a drummer boy, which is very possible considering his age.  This picture is obviously from many years later, and it's not the best picture I've seen of him.  He must have been a strong and healthy man; he was 65 when my grandmother was born.

I know nothing more about Linnell's Civil War service, but I plan to do some research and find out if he might have seen some action during his hundred days.  Who knows?  That research just might lead to another story.

Remembering

 

Today we remember the four terrorist attacks that were launched on America by the terrorist group al-Qaeda thirteen years ago.


Or we don't.


The 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. killed almost 3,000 people and left millions with long term respiratory and immune system problems.  It caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage and disrupted business and travel for weeks.  And it changed the American psyche, as we realized that we, too, were vulnerable to the violence and mayhem that has characterized the Middle East for a long time. 


The American people vowed that we would never forget.  We taught about 9/11 in our classrooms.  We observed moments of silence and produced special inserts in the papers, programs on TV, movies and books.  We constructed memorials, including the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, the Pentagon Memorial in Washington, and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  


But for many, the events of 9/11 faded into the past.  Our own personal lives, filled with tiny triumphs and defeats took precedence.


It is not surprising that the significance of 9/11 has faded for many people in our nation.  This, after all, is not the first event that we vowed to never forget.
Remember Pearl Harbor?  Remember the Maine?  Few of my students could tell you anything about either of these unforgettable events.


This is one compelling reason for reading historical fiction. Historical fiction reminds us of who we once were and what we went through in our past.  It personalizes bygone eras so that we can enter into them and see them through fresh eyes.  Through these eyes we remember not only the huge events of history, but the tiny triumphs and defeats of other, long ago personal lives.  We realize that we are a part of that long, hopeful line that stretches back through countless generations, each with a story to tell.


And we remember.

Parrott: the Gun Maker who Saved the Union

 

 

Robert Parker Parrott was a member of the West Point class of 1824 and joined the artillery after graduating.  One of his assignments, as inspector of ordnance at the newly founded West Point Foundry in Cold Springs, New York, led him to leave the Army and become the Foundry's Superintendant.

Leaving the Army to work for private company allowed Parrott the freedom to experiment with gun design without the red tape that government work, was known for even then.  Parrott began playing around with artillery design, eventually leading to the development of the first rifled cannon.  (For the September 1861 Scientific American article announcing his discoveries, click here.) 

The word rifling means carving a spiral into the inside of a tube.  Rifling a cannon made the projectile shot from it spin as it left the barrel.  As anyone who has ever thrown a football will know, putting a spin on a projectile allows for greater directional accuracy of the projectile.  The greater the accuracy, the more deadly the cannon barrage; in theory, at least, rifling allowed artillerymen to pinpoint their targets instead of just firing in the general direction and hoping for the best.

Rifling the cannon led to a secondary problem, however.  In order for the rifling to be effective, whatever was fired from the cannon had to fit tightly.  At the time of the Civil War, most artillery pieces were still loaded from the front end, the muzzle end.  That meant that whatever was fired had to go in the same way it came out, and that whatever went in had to be slowly and painstakingly corkscrewed down the rifle grooves before it could be fired back out.  Parrott solved this problem by developing a new type of shell for his muzzle-loading rifled cannon. This new shell had a ring of brass, a softer metal, at its base.  When fired, the brass expanded to fit the rifling. This sped up the time it took to load and fire cannon.

Greater accuracy and speed is a deadly combination in artillery, and Parrott offered this combination to the Union land and naval forces at cost.  This source inexpensive and superior weaponry was a serious advantage for the North in the Civil War.

Belying the Bells and Whistles

Everyone wants all the bells and whistles.  We want the latest and greatest and most state-of-the-art thingy available, and we want it as soon as it's available.

This yearning for the new is very apparent in my students.  I teach middle school.  Very few of my students have no cell phone.  Most not only have a cell phone, but they have a state-of-the-art model.  They are proud to show you that theirs is the latest and the greatest.  It has all the bells and whistles.


This isn't always to their advantage.  For many, their phones are more of a distraction than an aide to their education.  I've often been asked if they could use an ap to look up word definitions or spellings, only to find my students distracted by games or texts from their friends.


Last week in my advisory class we talked about good academic habits.  Among those habits was treating one's body well: eating good food, getting enough exercise, and getting enough sleep.  When I mentioned that one way to ensure a good night's sleep is to turn off one's cell phones, a number of my students errupted into protests.  How could they be expected to turn their phones off?  Their phones were their alarm clocks!  I suggested they might turn them to 'alarm only.'


"I can't do that," one girl said, despair dripping from her voice.  "I might miss something."


And so I've come to realize that many of my students are not getting enough sleep at night because they are afraid of missing something, afraid of missing the next big thing.  They have becomes slaves to their bells and whistles.


When I published my first novel, I published it as an ebook.  Even though I'd never read an ebook and didn't own a kindle or a nook, I'd read plenty of experts who said that ebooks were the next big thing, the state-of-the-art, bell and whistle way to read.  Ebooks were going to revolutionize the way books were marketed and the way books were read.  If this was the wave of the future, I wanted to catch it.


One of the big arguments for technology was that it would make information more accessible for more people.  E-readers would make even remote villages in third world countries would have access to huge stores of information.  Specialized software was going to make the written word accessible to people with handicaps that made reading impossible.  The promises were exciting indeed.


But the wave of the future hasn't been the Banzai pipeline to fame and fortune that I was given to believe.  While I've had some success with ebooks, I've had much more luck with my paperback editions.  Many of my readers tell me they like the feel of real paper in their hands.  They like the smell of it.  The heft of it.  They like turning the page.  Somehow, in spite all the expert opinions, the tried and true has won out over the state-of-the-art. 


So maybe the latest and the greatest has some value.  Perhaps from those bells and whistles we will develop new ways of reading that will help those who cannot read right now.  We will develop audio books and books that scan and scale to help those with disabilities. We will be able to distribute more books to people who live hundreds of miles from libraries, and put whole libraries into the hands of those who've never owned even one book.


Let us make sure that we control those bells and whistles instead of letting them control us.