Dear Long Recall Readers:
We regret to inform you that as of today, we will no longer be publishing posts on The Long Recall Civil War blog. Although it has been a wonderful experience learning about the Civil War in real time, personnel and time constraints have made maintaining and updating the blog extremely difficult over the past few months and we have finally made the decision to cease updating the blog. We will continue to follow Civil War history and related events on Walter Russell Mead’s new short-form Via Meadia blog.
Although we will no longer be updating The Long Recall, we will keep the site up on our website as a resource for anyone looking for information about the origins of and the political buildup to the Civil War, and we encourage anyone with an interest in American history to peruse our archives for sources. We found the project to be an eye-opening look not only at the war, but at the society and attitudes of the time period, as well as an intriguing study of the often biased and wildly incorrect reporting methods used then (see yesterday’s post for particularly egregious examples). We hope that we have been able to inspire a greater interest and understanding of American history, and that you will continue to explore the Civil War apart from the site.
Best Wishes,
- Andy Iacobucci, Kate Hall, Kelly Johnson
Special Thanks to Peter Mellgard, Damir Marusic, Mark Nugent, Lindsey Burrows, and Walter Russell Mead
I really enjoyed your exploration of the Civil War and will miss it greatly. Thank you very much for keeping it up so long, it could not have been easy.
Thank you, Andy, Kate and Kelly. It was enjoyable and eye opening.
It’s too bad you’re quitting this blog. I found it to be an interesting perspective, and quite contradicting of general historical narratives, and so prompted me to check into various facts here and there. It clearly had an overt and strong pro-Union view that disgarded many facts and history of what and why things were happening from a Southern perspective, but that challenge was good for digging in further. The difficulty with direct newspaper renditions of history is that research historians have ultimately found them not to be of the ultimate fidelity required to establish the true events, which task must be accomplished from a blend of diaries, official records and many sources from both sides. Generally Union battle reports and newspapers embellished, exaggerated, and often fabricated, making historical examination difficult without opposing sources like Southern diaries, records and various memoirs that emerged from 1870 to 1900.
I am gutted! I stumbled upon TLR last Fall and have been a devoted reader ever since. It’s the first thing I read every morning. I can’t express how much I have learned from this blog and how grateful I am to the folks who took on this huge task. It was a brilliant concept and in my opinion very well executed. Bravo to all of you. I will miss it immensely.
This is really too bad. I can definitely appreciate the immense amount of time this project consumed. I was thoroughly enjoying every day I read and loved the view back. As the previous commenter noted, the contemporary newspaper accounts were laden with propaganda – but that was half the fun.
I am so sorry that you are ending this. I opened the blog today with anticipation to see how the initial claims of union victory at Bull Run had been somewhat “overstated” and what the reaction was on all sides.
I found the day-to-day coverage of the events leading up to the war as well as the war itself provided an entirely different perspective than anything I had previously read. Daily coverage helped me understand the confusion and misunderstandings that people living through the events were experiencing.
It was a completely different view of the pace of history. Histories looking back (which I had thought were the only kind) necessarily condense events and remove the plodding sense of actual time. This daily dose re-hydrated the history. It made clear that real people living through what is later viewed as large moments in history act they way they do because they have such a different vantage point. Even the daily accounts of ordinary (and not so ordinary) deaths helped put in perspective how different their lives were.
I knew the daily blog was a lot of work and I want everyone involved to know how much I enjoyed it and how much it made me think. Thank you.
I can imagine that it was an enormous amount of work. Still, I’m hugely disappointed that you’re stopping, just as First Manassas has happened. I was very much looking forward to following the progress of the war in real time. I found the whole process very educational.
Thank you for all your productivity in creating such a valuable, informative, and educational resource. It will be missed.
Very sad news. I just found your blog…. Thank you for all your work thus far, I’ll be sure to continue to read your past post.
I second Kirk’s comments. This was the first site I read each day since last fall. I can’t imagine the amount of research required to keep this going but. like Andrew I would liked to have had just one more day.
no…no…no… I will so miss this site… I have followed every day since last November… sorry to hear this news…
You have done such a great job gathering info from many sources…
hope you might reconsider…
Such a shame. I subscribed to the magazine just to show my support for what was obviously a lot of effort. I would not have done that if I had known it wasn’t going to stay supported by the magazine. I really enjoyed this and will miss it, each day will seem a little empty without thinking about what was happening 150 years ago.
Oh, man I am going to miss this. It was a great blog.
Very sorry you can’t continue but I appreciate that it was a ton of work. You’re ending with a Union victory at Manassas, and I guess we’ll never find out how you would have fixed that the next day.
Sad to see the end of this blog. I loved following the messy process of history being made one day at a time. It was wildly ambitious and will be sorely missed.
You were over ambitious. The site was overkill. You should consider restarting it but limiting the links to two or three sources.
To echo many of the other responses, I’m sad to see this coming to an end.
Reliving the events one day at a time was enlightening. Without thinking ahead, how frustrating it must have been for those who lived at this time without the near immediate communications we now have.
I’mm miss this blog. It was well done and I enjoyed the collected references and links. Tracking historical events as they appeared in contemporary newspapers offers a view we all too often fail to see.
So sad to see this end. I was looking forward to following this through App’x. Nevertheless I appreciate what you have done and the effort it took.
This is a too great a loss for words. Is there anything else out there trying to do the same thing. Could you not find some way to fund such an important work?
Deeply disappointed – and grateful for the great and hard work you have put into this project.
This is a huge disappointment. I was so looking forward to the military narration that has just barely started.
I wonder, is there any way that this could be done in a wiki type fashion with more contributors to make the work level for those of you publishing more bearable?
I am delighted and grateful that this has continued for as long as it did! Such an amazing amount of effort to put into a project that required daily updates(especially in light of knowing how long the War lasted!).
I’m sure I’m not alone in holding out hope that you reconsider your decision, perhaps returning in favor of a less-ambitious weekly or bi-weekly update?
I am sad. This blog was very enlighting to our history. Thank you for your dedication to the Civil War. I will trully miss it.
To all the people involved in The Long Recall, good job! I’ve really enjoyed your hard work and dedication to such an interesting project. I wish you well in your future endeavors (and selfishly hope it involves work similar to The Long Recall.
Thank you for undertaking such a daunting task. I found it of interest to follow it, especially the Navy updates.
This was the kind of approach to the war a person couldn’t get anywhere else.
But, the time you had to expend to do it had to be huge.
Thanks.
Thanks for your work this far!! Sad to see it discontinued, it gave me some new insights.
Thank you so much for your hard work in producing this wonderful document! I will miss it greatly. It has immeasurably deepened my understanding of how this tragedy unfolded. I wish that you could have continued but understand that it must have been very hard work!
Thank you very much for a great job. I was looking forward to following the day-by-day narative and links to news items from the war. Reading history one day at a time puts a new perspective on such an important topic during this 150th anniversary. TLR will be missed by many with an interest in the war.
Really sorry to see you go, is there really no way this could continue, maybe losing the newspaper links and just having the main commentary? I can appreciate it’s a lot of work, as other people have mentioned, there must be a lot of experts out there who would be happy to contribute? I’ve been reading this here in London, England every day since you started and have enjoyed every word.
I’m sorry to see it go. Thanks for all your effort, I’ve been facinated by the chance to view the period, “in real time”, as it were. It helps to comprehend that vast difference between the illusion of clarity that looking backwards brings vs. the confusion of the present. Have facinated many friends by sharing bits and pieces with them. Thanks again.
Thank you all very much, it’s been wonderful to read and you’ve done such a good job of organizing everything!
Pingback: The Long Recall stops | The New Digital Storytelling
Drat! The last to know! When I came by there was always something fascinating and revelatory in this research. But I understand the difficulty of keeping something like this going; you practically needed a squadron of researchers, transcribers and bloggers who’d have to be paid, etc. to keep something this ambitious replenished and current for the duration. Now passed into the Mystic, just as the history it conveyed has gone, too.