ECW Podcast Special Edition: Gettysburg, the Elephant in the (Reading) Room
As a follow-up to our Emerging Civil War Podcast episode about Gettysburg as the elephant in the room, ECW’s Chris Mackowski spoke with publisher Ted Savas about the gravitational force Gettysburg has on the Civil War book business. What are the pros and cons for publishers, and how does that circle back to impact the larger field of Civil War studies?
A podcast version of this interview is available exclusively for ECW’s Patreon subscribers. A subscription to our Patreon page—which helps pay our podcast costs—also entitles you to exclusive free content. Sign up for as little as $1.99/month: https://www.patreon.com/emergingcivilwar.
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Thanks for having me on, Chris. I enjoy the interview. I look a little big for that elephant, so it must be a baby. 🙂
Just as I’ve often stated in these pages that we have been swamped by way too many books about Abraham Lincoln, especially with angelic fantasies about who he was and what he did – however great it indeed was – we also have way too many books about Gettysburg. Not least, most of the books of recent vintage bring nothing new to the discussion. The writers are lazy, failing to do proper research, failing to bring new primary sources to the telling, failing to examine the battle from new perspectives. It’s Geoffrey C. Ward and Allen Guelzo-style history writing: Copy and paste, copy and paste, insert cliches, insert falsehoods, copy and paste, copy and paste. The other culprits are the publishers, who eschew tremendously exciting new books from previously unknown and unpublished primary sources because they are too thick to see their value, opting for, “Oh! Gettysburg! Yeah – we can sell that! Just – don’t say anything new. Give me the old stuff and we’ll put a new wrapper on it and people will buy it for their Dads for Christmas at inflated prices.” And so Civil War history suffers…
Some publishers . . .