At 10:05 AM 11/14/97 -0600, Carol A Johnson wrote: >Hi Tom and all, Tom, thank you for your corrections. They make good >sense. But, as I said before in an earlier posting (and someone said >before me) "History is an account of something which never happened, >written by someone who wasn't there." I think that may be a bit harsh - >after all "where there's smoke - there is fire." It's like the blind men >describing the elephant - each one feeling it at a different place. This >was driven home to me when I started this genealogy stuff. The diarys and >letters of the common private in the Civil war told a totally different >story than the "history books." Then, who to believe? The one that makes >the most common sense. Your statement about "second army could not sustain >itself following another army" does indeed make sense. Not being a "battle >buff" these are things that I was not aware of. There's a historical specialty area (historiography) that deals with how history has been and is written and taught. The annales "school" of history concentrates on the ordinary people of a particular time. The annales "school" began in France, which is how it got its name. btw, an excellent source on a lot of 18th century weather across the eastern US is Francis Asbury. His diaries were collected and edited in a two-volume set *that I DON"T own* forty years ago or so: if you don't have regular access to a university library, you may be able to get these by ILL through your local library. (Asbury travelled across most of the eastern U.S. in the mid and late 18th centuries by *horse*, and he describes the weather, how he felt that day, who he stayed with (by *name*), etc.) Elizabeth Whitaker elwhitaker@shtc.net computer columnist, THE BETHUNE PAW PRINT http://Web.InfoAve.Net/~elwhitaker (new version) ==== NCORANGE Mailing List ==== Larry Noah - lrnoah@bigfoot.com - Listowner - NCORANGE mailing list Orange Co, NC USGenWeb site is at http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncorange USGenWeb Orange Co, NC Archives site is at http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/nc/orangnc.htm