About

About The Book

In the new ebook Poore Boys In Gray you can discover the Civil War through the stories of the three Poore brothers from the Piney Woods of Mississippi. Follow them on battlefields from Manassas to Appomattox. Learn about their family’s struggle to survive against Union raiders, Confederate tax agents, and the South’s most famous insurrections—the Knight Company. The Poore family witnessed many of the era’s most important events, events that shaped the future of American society and every person in it. You can buy Poore Boys In Gray on Amazon.com.

About This Blog

The Poore Boys In Gray blog is the online companion to the ebook. Here you can:

• Share your comments about the book.
• Provide updates and corrections to facts in the book.
• Learn tips for researching and writing your own family history.
• Discover sources that can reveal information about your family during the Civil War.
• Connect and work with others on your family history.

About Writing History

The Internet is changing the writing of history in almost the same way as it has changed journalism (at one time called the first rough draft of history). A few of the changes include:

• A switch from lecture to conversation: Readers expect to be involved. They are knowledgeable and know how to check facts as well as anyone. The Internet provides a place for instant collaboration, feedback and correction.
• The rise of the amateur: The problem in the past was access to sources. Sources were widely scattered. Using them required plentiful resources of both time and money. Today, more and more records are available online to researchers. Those records not already online can be requested by email from the holder and delivered in a digital format. This opens research to anyone with the desire to do so. Because everything online is connected, holes in a history story are quickly spotted.
• Everyone is a publisher now: In the past if a historian’s work didn’t reach the desired audience, that wasn’t the historian’s problem. Now it is important for the historian to be where the readers are and not the other way around. Anyone with a website, blog or Facebook page can begin publishing history. Anyone with an Amazon.com account can upload a history ebook and have it published within a few hours.

Many old-line historians have yet to recognize how these changes have shifted control of writing history from the academician to the talented scribbler.

Poore Boys In Gray is, in part, is an attempt to show other talented scribblers how to use this power.

About the Author

Ralph Poore grew up amid Civil War forts and battlefields in Mobile, Alabama. He is a former newspaper reporter and editor, and a former spokesman for a Fortune 500 company. He lives in Boise, Idaho.