h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...no wonder, with generals like Pickett. He sounds like a piece of work.

It is hard to believe that there was ever a time when people wrote like that, or thought like that. Or referred to Lee as 'Marse Robert'.

It gives you pause, doesn't it?

(Your vivid description also brought back a memory of my family's hasty retreat from Little Round Top after my five-year-old sister demanded, in the middle of a clump of Pennsylvania tourists, where 'them Yankees' were.)

Great to see this on the Front Page.
There are too many Edited Guide Entries with no people in them, and all too few with colourful ones.

I met an old friend for the first time in a long time the other day. Originally resident in Britain, he's lived and worked in the US for some fifteen years, mostly in Virginia (which I guess neatly splits you two) and by the sounds of it it's a state where the Civil War still has echoes. We talked about North and South and I said that they weren't so different, and that there were people throughout the States who seemed little different from Europeans. He was incredulous and said something that made me think. Hadn't I noticed that the European-like Northerners were like European liberals and the European-like Southerners were like European conservatives?

On reflection, I think it's probably true. There's something very old school about Southern graciousness.

I quite like Pickett. He has European traits of the well-born kind, over-educated to the point of witlessness, but somehow redeemed by energy.

I like Pickett too, Pin. I don't think he makes an easy villain.

Interesting comment from your friend. I'll have to keep that one in mind next time I'm down south.

The Civil war having echoes in the Old Dominion is, well, an understatement.

We were driving north once and stayed overnight in a Fairfax, Virginia, motel.

Turns out we were sleeping on a battlefield. The museum next door was very interesting. Mostly things gleaned from the battlefield.

The Civil War has echoes in the UK as well. I was born a short distance from Cammell Lairds shipyards where CSS Alabama was built. Over the water in Liverpool James Bulloch and his fellow confederate agents had homes and businesses they carried on during the war. Bulloch himself is buried in one of the local graveyards as is his brother Irvine who served on Alabama.