Ariel Ron

Two forthcoming books I'm excited for

As many as 2 million horses died in the Civil War, yet reports of soldiers eating horse meat are few. This despite the fact that soldiers, Confederates esp., were often hungry. There seemed to be few moral qualms about driving horses to death remorselessly. If hippophagy was taboo, why exactly?

If anyone knows more about how letter pressing techniques changed in the 19c, please lmk

www.ice.org.uk/news-views-i...

A funny thing about Civil War army bureaucracy is that they broke out the really good handwriting for generals but couldn’t bother with mere captains.

Any 19c historians here know about how letter press books worked? Did you have to write out the letter twice or have the sheet you'd send under the thin letter press paper (does it have a specific name)? for the ink to bleed through?

In effect this shows that the word "hay" increasingly modified the words "trade" and "business" after the 1880s. Interestingly, this was when the National Hay Association was founded, which reflected the hay trade's large scale and probably also generated more discussion of it in print.

Here's the finding. Not much evidence for the CW as important but an interesting increase around the turn of the century. But, these frequencies could just reflect more frequent use of the words trade and business in general, so I normalized by the respective terms...

vaguely interesting, probably little to no meaning: I asked chatGPT to write me a script to download google ngram data for "hay trade" and "hay business" plus "trade" and "business" as controls. The hypothesis is Civil War army purchasing of baled hay en masse led to more hay trade and biz talk...

How is it even possible to get this confused about things

In the 10th MA only 5 horses died from combat wounds. The rest were almost all disease or malnutrition or some combination.

Yeah I think the last sentence should be modified to read “in its original unit.” Iirc there were about 150 horses returned to the QM dept as not fit for service. Some of those presumably survived, though many presumably perished with other units or of disease while recovering.

astonishing attrition of horses in the Civil War

from an amazing recent Phd dissertation, "The Horses with No Names," by Frank Robert Boynton

currently reading. pretty interesting! however, the escheresque cover image doesn't promise solid realness by the end

R.L. DiNardo and Austin Bay, "Horse-Drawn Transport in the German Army"

CFP (please circulate): "Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest," co-hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and SMU's English Department via the "Narrative Now" initiative. DEADLINE: Aug 1.

CFP (please circulate): "Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest," co-hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies and SMU's English Department via the "Narrative Now" initiative. DEADLINE: Aug 1.

Check out the inaugural issue of the Journal of Texas History, open to the public. This comes from the wonderful Alliance for Texas History, which was created last year after the old THSA was taken over by a wealthy, politically motivated board member.

mavmatrix.uta.edu/journaltexas...

Most undergrads can’t read cursive at all

this is what we have to deal with

In other words, it seems both the GOP & farm lobby have officially given up on post-ww2 farm bill bargain of "food stamps + farm subsidies."

One Big Beautiful Bill Act: Agricultural Provisions The One Big Beautiful Bill Act boosts U.S. farm programs by $56.6B, strengthening the safety net, tax relief, conservation, and ag innovation through 2031.

Fun fact: the BBB has $52B in free money giveaways ("safety net") for farmers, while cutting up to $300B in SNAP.

The farm lobby is more or less openly treating the BBB as a replacement for an actual farm bill.

www.fb.org/market-intel...

For the record, before the 1830s or so--that is, during the US founding era--all of New York City's food markets were publicly owned.

eh.net/book_reviews...

The test for Mamdani will be if he can govern well but Trump won’t let him.

“The class of political belief systems which possess logical integrity and completeness is empty in America. Further, the construction of a logically consistent system which would justify or support the use of the terms ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ is doomed to failure.”

wow, I've got to find me one of these

Not sure how @arielron.bsky.social got it so far wrong.

It’s definitely a feeling

Good game, OKC learns from their mistakes.

Predictable and predicted