Year in Review 2020: #9

Our annual Top Ten List of Most-Read posts for the year usually has a built-in bias toward pieces posted early in the year. They then have a lot of time to accumulate readership over the course of the year.

But coming in at number nine this year is a piece that went up just a couple days ago.

“I almost didn’t write this piece,” says author Chris Mackowski. “I’ve been up to my eyeballs research and writing some pieces about the Vicksburg campaign, so I wanted to keep plowing ahead on with that and almost skipped this one. I almost felt like a throw-away piece that I dashed off in just a quick few minutes after going for a battlefield walk with my youngest son.”

The piece took off, though! “I can’t figure out the internet some days,” Chris admits. “Sometimes we slave over pieces with deep research, and they’ll get a few thousand reads, but then we might dash off something almost offhandedly, and it’ll get tens of thousands. There’s really no telling what’ll be what.”

#9: Deer Discovery Atop Marye’s Heights posted by Chris Mackowski on December 22, 2020:

Every so often, I am reminded in the most delightful of ways that the battlefields we love are not just historic sites but habitats….