A reader once typed her own last name into a search box on my website. Thirty seconds later she read six words that changed how she saw her family. Her great-great-grandfather earned the Medal of Honor.
That is the kind of moment I built these tools for. I write novels about the Civil War, and somewhere along the way I started building software too. It began with a simple question. Readers of Cadets to Captains kept asking if their own ancestors fought in the battles I described. I could not...
The Iron Decade: How 1850s Railroads Helped Decide the Civil War
By Tom O'Connor
Before Gettysburg, before Antietam, before the first shot at Fort Sumter, the Civil War already leaned north. The advantage did not begin on a battlefield, camp, or inside a Washington cabinet room. It began beside smoking iron mills, muddy grading crews, timber bridges, and thousands of miles of new railroad track spreading across the North during the 1850s.
In 1850, the United States ran 8,589 miles of railroad....
They Already Knew, The Delafield Commission, Part 1: Three Men, One Ruined City, and the Lessons That Came Home
They Already Knew
The Delafield Commission, Part 1: Three Men, One Ruined City, and the Lessons That Came Home
On July 3, 1863, twelve thousand five hundred Confederate soldiers walked into a mile of open Pennsylvania farmland. Rifles met them at four hundred yards. More than half were dead or wounded before the survivors reached the stone wall.
The Delafield Commission, Part 1: Three Men, One Ruined City, and the Lessons That Came Home
On July 3, 1863, twelve thousand five hundred Confederate soldiers walked into a mile of open Pennsylvania farmland. Rifles met them at four hundred yards. More than half were dead or wounded before the survivors reached the stone wall.
Every officer on that field knew the rifled musket’s range. They knew because three West Point officers had watched the same arithmetic play out at...
Had fun learning more about how to use NotebookLM this morning. Thought I would share it with you today.
First, I downloaded "Cadets to Captains: 1848-1860" into Google's NoteBookLM. Then I asked it to have several experts debate the book then create a NYT critic review of the book. As the author I love the output. Read with a large grain of salt. Most of all enjoy.
A Roundtable Debate: The Relevance of Cadets to Captains
The Literary Critic: Tom O'Connor's Cadets to Captains...
