Jonathan seems to have figured out a way to make the newspapers look non-terrible. If you’d like to take a look, you can click the thumbnail below.

My former colleague and dear friend Susan Schulten has a great piece about the relationship between war and geography up at The New Republic. Check it out!

Jonathan and I now have a final draft of Battle Lines ready. If you’d like to take a look and gently remind us, as one reader did a few months ago, that cotton wasn’t typically grown in Virginia in the 1840s, we sure would appreciate it.

Really, it’s too late for us to make major structural changes, but we’re very, very eager to root out any errors that have survived to this point in the writing process. This is especially true in the case of the newspaper stories, which are relatively text-dense and which I fear haven’t been vetted as carefully as the rest of the book.

Anyway, let me know if you’d like to kill some time by helping us out. If I hear from you, I’ll send you a link that should allow you to download a reduced-size file of the entire book. But be warned: even reduced, it’s still huge. Thanks!