philknox
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Posts posted by philknox
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I am having the same problem and pc specs are good.
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The German Army, unlike Fuller and Liddell Hart, always favored the destruction of the enemy in encirclement battles. Command paralysis was never a primary goal. German practice was firmly rooted in Clausewitz.
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For the record, Liddell Hart has been knocked down several notches of late. His "indirect approach" was really nothing new. If you are really interested in "blitzkrieg" and German Military history particularly relating to armor. I would read this article "Abuses of German Military History" by Daniel Hughes.
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I would add him.
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You are correct. My problem with Blight, Goodwin etc is that they are expecting too much of the people of the 19th Century.
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As far as Grant supporting black equality, we must also consider that many of his closest military colleagues did not view blacks as being equal and Grant did nothing about it. Sherman, Sheridan, John Gibbon, Torbert, Wilson, Miles, Upton, etc did not agree with blacks being equal. For every Howard or Pope, Army abolitionists among the Union officer corps I can find many more that held different points of view.
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I would add to vengeance the motivation of party politics and the political patronage that went with it. Men like Stevens, Sumner, Davis and Chandler wanted to bury the Democrat Party forever. As far as Frederick Douglass, outside of the intelligentsia he was not that popular. He just wasn't that influential, particularly during Reconstruction, and had no real influence to the average American white. I am not arguing counter-factual history when Reconstruction ended with the pre-existing social orders in place North and South. Reconstruction would not have ended without the support of Northern whites.
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There are no real modern counterparts to Clausewitz. Most strategists today are specialists in certain fields that relate to geo-politics/military science. However, I would suggest Colin S. Gray and Antulio Echevarria, Alan Millett, Christopher Bassford and the late Russell Weigley and Trevor DuPuy would be good places to start.
For the Napoleonic Period I would start with Gunther Rothenberg.
Civil War a much bigger list based on the topic- Donald Stoker, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, Richard Beringer, Steven Woodworth, Ethan Rafuse, Richard McMurry, Mark Grimsley, Joseph Harsh, Brooks Simpson and Albert Castel. This is not all inclusive there are more, but these are good places to go to.
I would also pay attention to Jennifer Murray at UVA Wise she is an up and coming military historian.
For World Two- Dennis Showalter, David Glantz, Jonathon House, Chris Lawrence, Niklas Zetterling, David Stahel, Karl Heinz Freiser and Rolf Dieter-Muller come to mind of late.
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With Jomini you will start to see the concepts of interior lines, concentration in time and space and other geometrical approaches to military tactics.
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If you want to understand Civil War tactics it is best to study Baron Jomini’s The Art of War, as study that many Civil War officers were familiar. Sun Tzu was unknown to the West during this time period and its Oriental mysticism would have been unpopular.
This may surprise many but Sun Tzu is NOT given much credence in higher professional military circles. Sun Tzu is considered too much of military fantasy and a work that ignores human nature to be of much use. See Michael I. Handel’s Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought for more commentary on this subject. Clausewitz is given much greater authority today. Both Sun Tzu are too formulaic and didactic while Clausewitz is dialectic.
If you want to understand Civil War tactics I recommend the following works
Brent Nosworthy’s The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War
Paddy Griffith’s Battle Tactics of the Civil War
Earl Hess’s Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness and
Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation
The latter is a pre-order, but it will be an excellent work. I have seen the manuscript.
For the record, I am a retired US Army Lt. Col., and graduate and lecturer at the US Army War College, at Carlisle.
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Gary Gallagher has the best books on this topic of late, with the Union War and the Confederate War.
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This is a power point of a class I did on Reconstruction. The Class was on the Civil War, but I divided into phases, the Antebellum Period, Civil War, and Reconstruction.
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There is no evidence that American society wanted racial reform, and much more to suggest otherwise. Racial equality would have been a non-starter in any white nation state during the time period.
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Yes they did. We must also keep in mind that many of what would become Jim Crow laws started in the North, and continued well into the 20th Century.
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If the Radicals had so wished they could have kept Reconstruction going indefinitely. They did not, and many, former Radicals, came to see Reconstruction as destructive to reconciliation. I can only take them at their word.
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Many of those Radicals switched to the Liberal Republican point of view, including leading Radical Sumner. We can chalk up Reconstruction to the thirst for vengeance, since many Radicals themselves said so and did not favor racial egalitarianism.
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Lost Cause mythology needs to disappear into the ash heap of history, but we should avoid the overreaction.
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I would also be careful and avoid overusing the word traitors when in reference to the South. I am not Lost Cause apologist, but we have to keep in mind that all Americans that supported the Revolution after 1776 were traitors to Great Britain, and the South was not the first region to seriously contemplate secession. New England farmers with the knowledge, and complicity of their state governments supplied the British Army with foodstuffs during the War of 1812. That was known at the time of 1861. I direct my students to Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
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3 minutes ago, Mr. Mercanto said:
We will have to agree to disagree on that. I happen to agree with Downes, Blight, and Foner that a "Golden Opportunity" did exist during Reconstruction, and that, no matter how you sice it, traitors were allowed to be citizens, and loyal men cast into apartheid; and it was done to appease the traitors, all due to race. These ideas are not exclusive to these historians, such contemporary view in the 1860s and 1870s are very well documented.
While the Civil War was not about racial egalitarianism, but I think Reconstruction in many respects was. Obviously Reconstruction had several agendas, and one can argue if Reconciliation failed them by failing to secure racial equality and create a truly pro-Union South, or if it succeeded by creating in the South a power structure which could embrace the Union. All of this depends on which agenda one decides fits Reconstruction.
My own view is that Reconstruction should have aimed to deconstruct the power structures that created secession and the war, above all the planter class and the hegemony of racism. Such would achieved by the appropriation of planter property for social uplift of white yeomens and Freedmen, and by racial equalty. Failing this, Reconstruction settled for allowing the old antebellum families to return to power, a new system of laws restablish racial hierarchy, and a memory of the war to flourish that celebrated treason, and buried the memory of Southern Unionists, black and white. In doing so, Reconstruction failed to destroy the heart of secession, and thus, in my estimation, was a failure.There was never any chance of a "Golden Opportunity" for racial equality in the Reconstruction Period when, from what we can tell, most abolitionists did not agree with the concept. Why else would the Liberal Republicans gain such widespread support. I have yet to find any widespread spread for support true racial egalitarianism from white abolitionists, and much evidence to the contrary. Even such abolitionist luminaries such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Sumner, William Seward, Carl Schurz, Charles Francis Adams, Cassius Clay and many other did not support 20th and 21st Century views on racial equality.
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The problem with Blight, Goodwin, McPherson, and others is that they expect too much from mid-19th century Americans, particularly on the ideas of racial equality. They tend to minimize the many forms of abolitionism, and ignore, or castigate when they do acknowledge it, that most white abolitionists were not interested in overturning the existing social order. The problem with DiLorenzo is that he is unfair to Lincoln. He found that Lincoln had fairly conventional American views on race, whooppee, excuse my academic term for big deal.
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Correction "How the North Won? " I haven't had my coffee yet.
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I would suggest Hattaway and Jones Why the North Won? and Hattaway, Jones, et al on Why the South Lost?
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I like Stoker's book and agree that the Chattanooga line was far more deadly to the Confederacy than the Mississippi line. My one problem is that he does underestimate the Confederacy's need for Virginia industry a little too much. Why so many historians ignore Northrop of the Confederate Commissary is a problem ?
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The question is that they will most likely never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. My problem with Blight is that he generally seems to be mad at white 19th Century Northerners for them not being 21st Century American liberals. The Civil War was never about racial egalitarianism, at least on the social level.
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Why is Steam showing I need to purchase the game when I already did the pre-order in 2019
in Installation Issues
Posted
I have the transaction id and key so why I am being asked to purchase?