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Cleveland’s Civil War Roundtable Takes an Excursion into Fiction

By Karen R. Long
Cleveland Plain Dealer Book Editor
Originally Published: Monday, September 19, 2011
Copyright © 2010 Cleveland Live, Inc.

Editor’s note: The novelist Robert Olmstead spoke to the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable at its September 2011 meeting. In attendance that night, at the invitation of CCWRT member William Vodrey, was Karen Long, the Cleveland Plain Dealer Book Editor. This piece was published in the Plain Dealer the following Sunday.

A Rebuttal to “Shelby Foote Was Wrong!”

By Greg Biggs, President, Clarksville TN CWRT
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2014, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in October 2014.

I read with interest the Dick Crews op-ed on how Shelby Foote got it wrong when he called Nathan Bedford Forrest one of the two geniuses of the Civil War. Forrest remains a controversial figure of the Civil War but he was, as Foote suggested, a true genius.

Shelby Foote Was Wrong!

By Dick Crews
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2014, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in October 2014.

Way back in the year 2000, when William Vodrey was President of our Roundtable, Shelby Foote was our big name speaker. You can argue that Ed Bearss or Bruce Catton are bigger name Cleveland CWRT speakers, but Shelby Foote was by far the most expensive.

Cleveland Civil War Roundtable: 1956 – 2006

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2006, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published as part of the Roundtable’s 50th anniversary celebration in November 2006.

Early Years

I was a Johnny-Come-Lately as far as the Civil War was concerned. Forty years ago I was given a copy of Ben Ames Williams’ House Divided. From that day on my interest in the war and its personalities became an obsession. When the Cleveland Roundtable came into being I found a group of men who shared my enthusiasm. Many close friendships developed, friendships that continue to this day. It has been a rewarding experience.

– John Cullen, 1994

Cleveland Civil War Roundtable 60th Anniversary

By Mel Maurer
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: Mel Maurer is a past president of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable and served for many years as its Historian. The address below was delivered at the November 9, 2016 meeting of the Roundtable commemorating the 60th anniversary of the club’s founding.

Three score years ago this month – our founders brought forth in Cleveland a new Civil War Roundtable dedicated to the “belief that the American Civil War is the defining event in U.S. history.”

The Confederate Battle Flag, Personal License Plates, and Litigation

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved

In Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Random House, 1998), he devotes a chapter entitled “Dying for Dixie” to the killing of a neo-Confederate in Kentucky devoted to the Confederate flag by a black teenager and the antipathy of African Americans to Confederate symbols that defended slavery. In contrast, many Southerners regard the flag as a symbol of Southern patriotism and reject attempts to ban it from public places. The definitive history of the Confederate battle flag and the contemporary controversies over its display is The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard University Press, 2005) by John Coski, Library Director of the Museum of the Confederacy.

The Campaign Against the Confederate Battle Flag

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved

July 9, 2015 saw Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, sign the bill removing the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the state capital. This ended a decades long struggle. The flag came down the next day, to be placed in a museum. This was triggered by the massacre of nine African Americans participating in a Bible study group in the historic Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston on June 17 by a white supremacist.

Jefferson Davis Monuments Being Removed?

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

Confederate President Jefferson Davis is memorialized in monuments at various locations in the South. They have now come under fire, with demands that some be removed from public grounds.

The Sharpshooter and His Weapon

By Sid Sidlo
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: At the time this article was originally published in The Charger in the fall of 2001, Sid Sidlo was editor of the The Ramrod, the newsletter of the North Carolina CWRT.

Hitting a distant target with a bullet only looks easy. It takes a keen eye, steady hands, a great deal of training and practice, and a good firearm. Even with those qualifications and today’s high-powered rifles, it is difficult to hit a man-sized target at three hundred yards without resting the rifle securely. And the black powder of the Civil War era was not high power. Now imagine firing a rifle at a distant enemy on a battlefield covered with powder smoke, with shell fragments flying around, and with the enemy riflemen and artillery in turn finding you a very desirable target. It took cool nerves under those conditions to estimate carefully the distance to the target, determine the high trajectory needed at the time, and allow for any wind. But that was the task of the Civil War sharpshooter, both Union and Confederate.