10,000 Posts!

Welcome to Emerging Civil War’s 10,000th blog post!

Our first blog post came on August 18, 2011—a general “welcome to ECW” sort of thing. Our first bylined post came days later on August 22, “Some General Thoughts on Major General George A. Custer” by Daniel T. Davis. Between late August and the end of the year, we published 119 posts.

Thirty-two-hundred days later, on May 22, 2020, we hit the 5,000-post milestone. That took just under nine years.

It took just under six years to get the next five thousand. Today—5,311 days after our first post—we have hit 10,000.

Wow.

Wow.

Over the course of those 10,000 posts, we’ve attracted more than eight million views and nearly 42,000 comments. Our posts have totaled 7,158,025 words (with 114 thousand words this year so far).

Not too bad for “three idiots sitting on a porch.” I’m not sure Kris White, Jake Struhelka, or I imagined ECW would ever be this far along. (In fact, this post marks my 1,300th bylined piece on the blog.)

I started to count up the number of authors who have contributed to ECW over the years to get us to 10,000, but I admit, I quickly lost track. Many of our earliest compatriots have “emerged” into full-fledged, fully matured careers beyond ECW, which is the entire point. In their place, new “emerging voices” have stepped up into the spotlight. We remain proud of our core mission to provide a platform for those new voices as they establish themselves in the field.

We have also hosted an incredible array of guest authors over the years. A string of talented editorial board chairs—including Kevin Pawlak, Jon-Erik Gilot, Jon Tracey, and Neil Chatelain—has helped manage that workflow and worked with our (anonymous) editorial board to ensure high-quality content.

Our platform became all the more important when Blue & Gray Magazine and then Civil War Times and America’s Civil War magazines vanished from the scene. The platform has also been important because of the rise of digital media, which smashed down so many gate-keeping mechanisms and made it possible for anyone and everyone to become content creators, flooding the zone with noise. (In some ways, we were among those gate-crashers, although our core consisted of public history professionals and we continue to adhere to a peer-review process for submissions.) Being an established, stable, credible platform for Civil War history has felt like a safe harbor in the digital storm.

We have benefitted from great partnerships along the way. Patrick Young’s Reconstruction Era Blog, for instance, and Brian Swartz’s Maine at War, have been stalwart partners for years. Civil War Trails, the Civil War Roundtable Congress, and Central Virginia Battlefields Trust have all provided regular content over the years, too.

Our weekly Question of the Week—which dates all the way back to September 24, 2012—has remained steadfastly popular (and often provocative!).

Of course, we never could have reached 10,000 posts if it wasn’t for you, Faithful Reader. You keep coming back, you keep sharing our stories, you keep buying our books and attending our Symposium. You are the reason we continue to keep going strong. THANK YOU.

To commemorate our 10,000 posts, I’ve asked my ECW colleagues to share their favorite ECW stories from the past 5,311+ days. I asked each contributor to pick their three favorite stories written by their colleagues, and I also asked them to share their two favorite pieces of their own work. I thought this would be a cool way for us dip into our amazing archive of material amassed over nearly fifteen years.

We’ll share those picks each morning over the next few weeks. I hope you’ll please take the time to get re-acquainted with our many great archival treasures and enjoy the extra reading material each day.

To start us off, though, I wanted to pay homage to our three ECW colleagues who have passed away. While they’re not able to be with us to celebrate this fantastic milestone, their work was instrumental in getting us here. Please enjoy these “greatest hits” from some of our most beloved writers:

Meg Groeling: War Chicken, posted on February 20, 2012

Dwight Hughes: No Monuments on the Ocean, posted on March 3, 2017

Eric Wittenberg: The Evolutionary of Cavalry Tactics: How Technology Drive Change, an eight-part series that Eric began in October 2014, then paused, then finished in February–March 2019