The first in what will be numerous blogs about history!!!

So this is my very first attempt at writing a blog, and I gotta say I feel pretty awesome about writing it. You know blogging used to be reserved for just the very left and very right wings of the political spectrum. Yes folks, blogging was once the vechicle in which god-fearing, money loving, Log Cabin Republicans and hygenically-challenged, communistic, hippie Democrats used to further propagate their toy dog loving/pot smoking beliefs.
















.....And then there are people like me, who don't try to push beliefs or weird theories on people. I just throw up random facts, and my opinions about said facts. I'm a history buff, specifically military history, even more specifically, American military history. Everything from the Revolution to today's current conflicts interests me. I especially like studying all the obscure and oddball wars that EVERYONE forgets....specifically the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812 and the Korean conflict.



Why do I like all this stuff so much? Well it's all easily explained. When I was a kid, my dad used to have all these old books about history. Being the small nerdling that I was, I got totally into these books about the Civil War and World War II. And speaking of World War II, my grandfather who until very recently used to live right across the street from me, is a veteran. So everyday after school I would say to myself "fuck this math homework, I'm going to talk to grandpa about airplanes." Grandpa was a mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Force back in the 40's. He worked on P-39 Airacobras....sweet-ass aircraft that could rip German, Italian and Japanese ground forces new assholes with their 37mm cannon. Grandpa saw most of the world during his military days, starting out on the beaches of Morocco and ending up in the hills of China when everything was all said and done. Naturally, his stories were more interesting than any game of basketball or football being played by the kids on my street. My father took me to everything history-related, from airshows with vintage World War II aircraft to Civil War reenactments. I always thought as a kid how awesome it would be to reenact, especially the part about camping out on the battlefields! My dad, being a geneology nut, also found out that I had numerous ancestors who fought in the Civil War. They were all Northerners, all from New York and Pennsylvania, and all of them kicked some serious hillbilly ass, except for one who ended up joining up two weeks before the war ended. Lucky son of a bitch.
As a teenager, punk rock was my life. Every day I would come home from school and either practice playing guitar with my band, or throw a Misfits vinyl on the record player and just jam out. Even though my hair was dyed turquoise and my jeans ripped, I never lost interest in history. I was probably the only kid who could play "Story of my Life" by Social Distortion on my guitar AND name all the senior Union Army generals in the Civil War. After I graduated high school I went on to community college, and it was while in school that I got interested in the War of 1812. My first book on the subject was called "Lords of the Lake" by Robert Malcomson, which dealt specifically with the battles that took place on Lake Ontario- only a three minute drive down the road from me. I guess what fascinated me about this war was that it happend so close to where I live, and that I only had to drive fifteen minutes in either direction to get to a site where some kind of invasion by Royal Marines or skirmish had happened. If I go two hours west, I wind up at Fort Niagara, which saw a ton of fighting during the war, and which will be my next topic in my next blog...providing I can work out all the bugs with this one.



So here I am now, at age twenty-three, looking back at what got me interested in history. This summer I will be reenacting the War of 1812 with MacKay's company of the 77th New York State Militia, a local reenacting group from Caledonia. It's been a boyhood dream of mine to reenact, and I'd like to think in some small way I'm keeping the history of that war alive so that future generations might get interested in it. And that's really why I am writing this blog. I intend to visit as many historic sites as I can, take pictures, and post them up here and provide a brief history of the joint I visited as well as it's significance. I especially plan on visiting as many War of 1812 sites as possible, and I hope to find out a lot more information about the rest of America's forgotten wars. No veteran, no matter what war they fought in, should EVER be forgot. People fought and died in these wars to preserve our country. I mean, if you call yourself a true blue American who really cares about this country, you'd know about all the tiny wars that this country fought so you could live the way you live today. Think about that the next time you take your freedoms for granted.

This summer, there may be a lot of historic sites that will not be accessable in New York State. Thank's to Albany's sheer stupidity, the state has decided that it may close down 50 parks here in order to make up for the deficit. Well I am sure I'm not the only one who thinks that there are other things that Albany can cut rather than our state parks! I am going to do my utmost to visit these places before they potentially close. So I'll keep you folks posted on what goes on and where I go. Hopefully I'll have something up on here about Fort Niagara in a few days. -Brian