Pre-orders being taken for new Civil War book – signed copies!

 

Human Interest Stories of the Civil War is the first book in a planned series from the tandem of brothers Scott L. Mingus, Jr. and Thomas M. Mingus. For more than a year, they culled through hundreds of old primary eyewitness sources (letters, diaries, journals, newspaper articles, reminiscences, and regimental histories) and selected a diverse variety of anecdotes. The authors rewrote and condensed these stories into modern English so that today’s reader might enjoy learning about these long forgotten incidents from the War Between the States.

Ten Roads Publishing of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, will be publishing this collection of human interest stories later this year. Pre-orders are now being taken for autographed first edition copies signed by both authors. This book is sure to be a popular Christmas gift for that Civil War buff on your shopping list! Priced at only $14.95, it is a bargain at only pennies per story, and there are more than 200 of them, ranging from the humorous to the ironic and/or tragic.

Here are some examples from the book:

Battle of Honey Hill featured in Issue #29 of Charge newsletter

Honey Hill has always been one of my favorite Civil War battles to wargame. Years ago I gamemastered a Johnny Reb 3 scenario for this battle at a now-defunct comic book store in Madison, Ohio. My friend Doug Rogers and one of his sons opposed me and one of my boys. Honey Hill gives the gamer a chance to use a wide variety of figures that are not commonly seen on wargaming tables at the same time. The Union forces includes US Colored Troops, the famed 54th Massachusetts, US Marines, a Naval Brigade, and state volunteer troops, while the Rebels were a concentration of various units of Georgia militia. The entrenchments at Honey Hill had been designed and constructed by Robert E. Lee early in the war before he went back to Virginia before the Peninsula Campaign.

In the most recent issue of the hard copy Charge newsletter, we present an original Honey Hill scenario from long-time gamer Lowell Hamilton. While designed for Regimental Fire & Fury, it is an interesting scenario that is easily adapted to Johnny Reb 3 or other similar regimental rules sets.

The Scenario-2

Historical Commentary-2

For some reason, when Lowell’s Excel file for the unit labels was transferred into MS Word and formatted to match the typically layout of Charge, the sizing and format of the labels rendered them nonusable for RFF gamers. Please click on the link to call up the labels in their original Excel formatting.

Honey Hill OoB

Lowell will be submitting what promises to be a very good article on converting all those hundreds of JR scenarios out there to RFF. Watch for this in the next hard copy of Charge.

Jim Kopchak’s 15mm Battle of Shiloh wargame at Fall In 2010

I attended the annual Fall In 2010 miniature wargaming convention at the Lancaster Host on US30 in Lancester PA. I was only able to go for a brief time on Friday night because of work commitments, and not at all on Saturday as it conflicted with the Halloween weekend and previously scheduled events. It also conflicted with the annual MilitaryHistoryOnline.com Civil War muster at Gettysburg, which I also missed. Too many fun events on a weekend already chock full!