I'm reading an ebook right now called "Andersonville," an eyewitness account of the Andersonville prison in the Civil War. It is so amazing that, every so often today during my day, I go upstairs and read another few pages. A couple points of note, aside from the basic point that this is a carefully told story full of astounding facts of man's inhumanity to man:
The book was written in 1870-something in what the author calls "modernized" spelling in his preface. I was looking forward to a real freak show, a la reading Shaw, but this was actually just modern spelling, the kind we use today. It could have been written last week.
The book was first published as articles in the Toledo Blade. And this was not the first significant contribution the Blade had made to Civil War literature -- the book reminded me to finally look into and read the Petroleum V. Nasby letters, a plaque commemorating which appears on the outside of the Toledo Blade building. They're written in dialect and pretty much broke my head, but they're pretty funny for all that. You can see how they might have helped make the South's case for slavery seem pretty weak. And at the same time, now, in the present, they helped me to understand how seriously the case for slavery was being made. Modern historians point out that there were 50-hundred other causes for the Civil War, that slavery was only one reason for the conflict between North and South, but no matter where you stood on all the other tax and rights issues at (um) issue, you'd have to believe pretty deeply in slavery to remain a Southerner, I think, once the war started.