Category Archives: History

History

Sharpsburg

23 Comments

We’re heading through a parade of sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Civil War. Today is the anniversary of Antietam. Mac Owens remembers (well, not literally — I’m pretty sure he wasn’t there):

The Battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg was a tactical draw. McClellan deployed his troops piecemeal, permitting Lee to hold on by his teeth. Time after time, Lee, badly outnumbered and with his back to the Potomac, was able to avert disaster by shifting his forces from one part of the field to another. For some reason, McClellan did not commit his reserve, which may well have crushed the Confederates. That the battle ended as a tactical draw is seen as a tribute to Lee’s generalship.

But it marked the failure of Lee’s preferred strategy. For the Confederacy, Antietam marked flood tide. As events were to prove, having failed, the South would only recede.

On the other hand, the battle, although a draw, provided an opportunity for President Abraham Lincoln to reverse Union fortunes just as surely as Lee had reversed those of the Confederacy. Thus, after Lee’s invasion of Maryland was turned back, Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, which gave the Confederates 100 days to submit to the Union or face the prospect of immediate emancipation of its slaves. The time had come, Lincoln wrote to Cuthbert Bullitt, to stop waging war “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water.”

Southern Unionists, loyal slave-holders, and Democrats charged that Lincoln was “revolutionizing” the war by issuing his proclamation. Lincoln did not disagree, admitting that once the proclamation took effect, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation and extermination.”

Had McClellan not been so (repeatedly) timid in following up, the war might have ended years sooner. But it took a Grant to understanding the key to victory.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Democrats’ New False Campaign Narrative

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I have some thoughts on Bill Clinton’s nonsense, over at PJMedia.

A commenter over there makes a good point. If you look at the curve of the current “recovery, it does appear that it started to rebound symmetrically, but something happened to cause it to stall out. His theory is that it was the passage of ObamaCare. I think that’s a good guess.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related thoughts from Jen Rubin:

If you had been dropped from outer space into the Democratic National Convention, you would have thought that we enjoyed full employment, reduced poverty and stared down Iran, leaving us with deeply important issues like paying for birth control for grown women. You would have thought that a large majority of Americans weren’t sympathetic to Israel and weren’t religious. You’d have thought that the federal government had money to burn and no looming debt crisis. You would never have thought that Obama had signed a “historic” health-care bill. And you’d have thought that the political heavyweight in the Obama household was Michelle. (Well, you might have been right about the last one.)

But knowing that the America of 2012 is so very different than the convention portrait, it’s worth asking how the Democrats’ convention became so divorced from reality.

As she says, it’s been a long time coming.

History, Space, Space History

Missile History

28 Comments

Here’s what I have for my space safety paper:

ICBMs were never designed to be highly reliable, because to do so would have dramatically increased their costs (many hundreds of them were built), and it wasn’t necessary for their mission. They were designed to be launched in massive numbers, and if a few out of a hundred didn’t make it through, that was all right, because they were often redundant in their targeting (that is, more than one missile would be aimed at a key target). Some estimates at the time of the reliability of the Titan II was only 80% or so (that is, one in five would not deliver its payload to the designated target), based on the fact that eight of its initial thirty-three test launches were failures. The early manned spaceflights were performed on modified versions of them (specifically, the Redstone and Atlas for Mercury and Titan II for Gemini). But what was good enough for a weapon as part of a fusillade of dozens or hundreds wasn’t perceived to be for a single flight carrying a human, particularly with recent memories of nationally televised ignominious failures of rockets on the launch pad. Thus was born the pernicious (and now obsolete) concept of “man rating,” which confuses the space industry and obfuscates policy down to this very day.

Is there anything inaccurate in that?

History, Popular Culture, Space, Space History

End Of An Icon

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Neil Armstrong has died.

That’s a shame — he was only 82, which isn’t that old these days. No word of the cause of death. I’d heard that he’d been doing well since his recent heart surgery, so either there were later complications, or he just happened to succumb to something else.

The irony, of course, as it notes in the bio, is that he never wanted to be an icon, and generally shunned the publicity. In any event, ad astra, and resquiescat in pace.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, my Facebook wall is all Neil, all the time.