 My World in All Its Variations  I'm an author and military historian, amateur cook, retired educator, expatriate New Yorker living mostly in Texas. That's all explored here, and more. Please be my guest and wander around. Questions? Just ask me, Al Nofi This is me, cooking Italian sausage with grapes (see My Recipes), some years ago at the home of our good friends the Alejandro family, of Fairfax, Virginia. Of Late . . . ! CIC No. 389 has just been posted on StrategyPage, which includes amusing items about Napoleon III and Benito Mussolini, as well as a poem "The Wasp's Frolic", and other matters.On October 29, 2011, I gave a talk at the NYMAS "Civil Warriors" conference, devoted to "Ordinary Americans", on “Charles Brunner, the Peugnet Brothers, Augustus
M. Clark, and James Boardman.” Some pictures of the event were posted by NYMAS member Ed
Chen.
On Thursday, August 11, 2011, I gave a talk under the NYMAS aegis at the
Henry Hudson Park Branch of the New York Public Library, on the topic “Jeff Davis
Takes a Train: Politics, Railroads, and the Civil War." A number of pictures of the event have been posted on my FaceBook Page. From July 15th to July 20th we rode the Civil War Train with nearly 50 other rail and CW students, aboard five refurbished cars from the great old days of railroading, going from St. Louis to Washington in rather grand style . . . some of the folks are posting comments and pictures on The Civil War Train FaceBook Page My book To Train the Fleet For War (reviewed on StrategyPage), has been given the 2011 John Lyman Book Award in Navy History by the North American Society of Oceanic History and also awarded Honorable Mention by the New York Council of the The Navy League of the United States for the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize in Naval History for 2011. One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power, recently issued by the Naval Institute Press, has a chapter I wrote on "Aviation in the Interwar Fleet Maneuvers, 1919-1940.” In 2010 the Naval War College Press released my latest book, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, which has attracted considerable attention, with favorable comment in The Naval War College Review. During late July and early August of 2010 I co-led a tour group that visited battlefields, fortresses, and other sights across parts of France and Belgium, while eating and drinking excellent stuff. There are a lot of pictures posted on the FaceBook Tour of Battle page, on my own FB Tour of Battle Album, and on Flickr Nestor Cerda has a neat military history website, and on January 23, 2010 posted my essay on the changing American perception of the Spanish soldier during the 1898 war in both English (From 'Dagoes' to 'Nervy Spaniards' ) and Spanish (De 'Dagoes' a 'Espanoles atrevidos) Military historian Mark Grimsley's recent talk "Why the Civil Rights Movement Was an Insurgency, and Why It Matters" elaborated, and greatly improved, some ideas I developed in my paper on "Recent Trends in Thinking About Warfare". Security analys Bruce Schneier later commented on this concept in his Blog "Schneier on Security," which generated some interesting commentary. On April 13, 2010, Dr. Barry L. Gan, Director of the Center for Nonviolence at St. Bonaventure University, responded with a piece titled "Why the Civil Rights Movement Was *Not* an Insurgency," which has also elicited some commentary. On May 7, 2009, Jim Dunnigan and I had a "conversation" about "The U.S. Navy: Green vs. Blue" My March 20, 2009, lecture for NYMAS on "Aviation in the Fleet Problems, 1923-1940," the subject of a chapter that I am contributing to a book commemorating the 100th anniversary of naval aviation, is available online as an audio podcast, complete with audience Q&A. |