Breaking News

I've been following the Civil War as breaking news. Our Civil War.

The NY Times has been posting a wonderful series called Disunion. It mirrors the Civil War calendar of events; so we are in March 1861 right now.

I am also reading The Library of America's The Civil War: The First Year. Again, I am following events of 1861 in synch with this month through speeches, letters, and articles from those fraught times.

And lastly, I have been reading NY Times articles from that time in a facsimile edition that I bought some years ago for our library. It is interesting that breaking stories in that edition were prefaced with qualifiers about the reliability of the sources as they try to balance accountability with "scoops" as distant battles were in progress.

Reading these as breaking news, even as rebellion and civil war fill our contemporary world, invests them with an urgency no less palpable then tweets and video footage from Libya.