The Desk
Short-form writing across the disciplines — history, law, veteran advocacy, and analytics. The long-form work lives under Books and Investigations; this is where the in-progress thinking goes.
Status
The blog publishes irregularly — work only goes up when it’s ready, not on a schedule. Posts cluster around active research: what’s shaping the Crusade book this week, what the BLS data is showing, what the corporate-personhood doctrine looks like under a fresh read. No hot takes. No filler.
Latest from the desk · Memorial Day 2026
The Memorial Day 2026 series closes with one post in the author’s own voice — a veteran and former Army mortarman on the names he carries, and what the day asks of the living. The capstone of the ten-post series.
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Memorial Day 2026
The Memorial Day 2026 series closes with one post in the author’s own voice — a veteran and former Army mortarman on the names he carries, the decision not to print them, and what the day asks of the living. Day 10 and the capstone of the series.
Hoosier Union History
On May 30, 1868, ten thousand people walked into a national cemetery in Indianapolis to decorate the graves of the Union dead. Indiana has kept the day ever since. Post 13 of the Hoosier Union History series, and the close of the Memorial Day weekend arc.
Memorial Day 2026
Memorial Day written plainly for teen readers: what the day is for, the three small things it asks, what it does not ask, and why it matters to the generation about to inherit these decisions. Day 9 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Hoosier Union History
Indianapolis had no ground set apart for its war dead until 1866, when a new national cemetery began gathering them, soldier by soldier, inside Crown Hill. Post 12 of the Hoosier Union History series.
Memorial Day 2026
The post-9/11 generation has its own Memorial Day arithmetic — roughly 7,000 dead in named operations, a far larger post-service loss, and an unresolved argument about which deaths the day was set aside for. Day 8 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Hoosier Union History
Decades after the war, Indiana’s veterans went back to the fields where they fought and set their regiments in granite — the 27th Indiana’s stones at Spangler’s Spring and in the Cornfield. Post 11 of the Hoosier Union History series.
Site Update
A new state-by-state memorial map counts US military deaths across six American wars — the Civil War to the Global War on Terror. A note on what it shows, the editorial choices behind it, and what it cannot yet do.
Memorial Day 2026
The blue star meant a son or daughter in uniform; the gold star meant they were not coming home. The symbol, the families it now names, and the plain language a country can use when it stands with them. Day 7 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Hoosier Union History
In 1902 Indiana finished a 284-foot monument to its Civil War soldiers and set it at the literal center of Indianapolis. Post 10 of the Hoosier Union History series, and the first of a four-part Memorial Day weekend arc on how Indiana remembers its Union dead.
Hoosier Union History
Two soldiers of an Indiana regiment, resting in a Maryland meadow, found three cigars wrapped in a sheet of paper. The paper was Robert E. Lee’s battle plan. Post 9 of the Hoosier Union History series.
Memorial Day 2026
Ten specific things a person can do on Memorial Day — not greeting-card filler. Each one is named, achievable, and connected to a real practice or law. Day 6 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Hoosier Union History
Indiana’s Civil War governor kept the state producing soldiers at a rate no one expected — and ran its government for two years without a legislature, in a way the courts later condemned. Post 8 of the Hoosier Union History series gives the documentary treatment to the hardest figure in it.
Memorial Day 2026
A red flower from a Belgian battlefield. A circle of greenery laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A chair left empty at a table set for the missing. Three symbols, three origins, one shared function — making absence visible. Day 5 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Memorial Day 2026
A short post for younger readers about what the flags at a cemetery mean, and why a country sets aside a day for the people who do not come home. Day 4 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Hoosier Union History
Lew Wallace was a Crawfordsville lawyer who raised the 11th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in April 1861, was blamed by Grant for the near-disaster at Shiloh, redeemed himself at Monocacy in July 1864, and returned home to write the bestselling American novel of the 19th century. The first post under the renamed Hoosier Union History series.
Union History
In January 1865 a Chicago publisher released “Marching Through Georgia.” The march had ended six weeks earlier. The Hoosiers did not sing this song on the march — the song did not yet exist. They sang it for the rest of their lives, at every GAR reunion and every Memorial Day service, to remember what they had done.
Union History
On New Year’s Day 1863 a Hoosier editorialist published a poem about a dying sergeant from Shiloh. Five years later, an Illinois general’s order designated the first Decoration Day. A Hoosier coda on the trilogy — the soldier-voice of 1863 and the community-liturgy of 1868, side by side.
Memorial Day 2026
Three federal holidays, three different purposes, three dates. Why the country still confuses them — and why the language should follow the audience: the people honored on Memorial Day cannot hear the thank-you. Day 3 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Memorial Day 2026
The origin story most Americans were told is incomplete. Charleston’s freedmen in May 1865, General Logan’s 1868 order, more than two dozen towns claiming the day, and the long-weekend politics of 1968. The plural — and more honest — record. Day 2 of the ten-post Memorial Day 2026 series.
Union History
Theodore Upson’s diary reached print in 1943. William Bluffton Miller’s in 2005. Sixty-two years apart, different publishers, different editorial cultures — and a different kind of testimony preserved by each. Entry six and the close of a three-post arc on the Hoosier diaries.
Union History
Indiana’s only Black regiment had a voice during the war — in The Christian Recorder, in letters preserved at smaller archives, in a chaplain’s reunion with his own mother on a Richmond street on April 4, 1865. Part One of this series called it a silence. Entry five is the correction.
Memorial Day 2026
More than 1.3 million Americans have died in uniform. Memorial Day exists because the country decided it needed a calendar day for that fact. The cornerstone essay of a ten-post series running daily through Monday, May 25 — ten different ways into the same meaning, one for each room of readers the day still belongs to.
Union History
Two Hoosier diaries and a regiment whose voices the archive kept differently. Theodore Upson of the 100th Indiana, First Sergeant William Bluffton Miller of the 75th Indiana, and the men of the 28th USCT. Entry four in a standing Union-history series — the first in its story-driven mode.
Union History
The only all-Western brigade in the Army of the Potomac. The 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin and the 24th Michigan earned the name “Iron Brigade” at South Mountain — and lost close to two-thirds of their strength on the first day at Gettysburg, the highest battle-death rate of any brigade in the Union Army. Entry three in the standing Union-history series.
Union History
The 54th Massachusetts led the assault on Battery Wagner, refused unequal pay for eighteen months rather than accept seven dollars to a white soldier’s thirteen, and opened the door for the roughly 179,000 Black soldiers of the United States Colored Troops. Entry two in the standing Union-history series.
Union History
What Indiana gave the Union — 129 infantry regiments, roughly 196,000 men, about 24,000 dead. The 27th Indiana finding Lee’s Lost Order in a Maryland meadow. Wallace’s Zouaves, the Iron Brigade’s 19th, the 28th USCT at the Crater. The first entry in a standing Union-history series — the table the Memorial Day series sits on.
Site Updates
Two new household-cost decision tools join the analytics portfolio. The TCBI publishes a weekly basket cost down to the census tract. The TSCI publishes the fixed monthly shelter and family-cost nut at the county grain. Both are federal public-domain data, fully attributed, free to use — with the same honesty about clamps, state inheritance, and vintage drift that the VLI carries.
Veteran Organizations
Founded January 2010 by Jake Wood and William McNulty in response to the Haiti earthquake. The Greyshirt model, FEMA partnership, signature deployments. The argument that a veterans' organization doesn't have to be primarily about benefits or fraternal life — it can be operational.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 2004 by Paul Rieckhoff as the first major non-partisan post-9/11 advocacy organization. The Post-9/11 GI Bill (2008), the Clay Hunt SAV Act (2015), the modern legislative playbook — the GAR's pension-lobby template applied to a single generation.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 2003 in Roanoke as a backpack program; grew explosively post-9/11. The 2016 CBS and NYT spending reporting, the leadership terminations, the operational reset. A rigorous read of the largest post-9/11 veterans' charity — judgment earned by evidence, not by tone.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 1994 by Bonnie Carroll after the 1992 C-12 crash that killed her husband. The peer-mentor model for surviving families — covering combat deaths, training accidents, illness, and suicide loss. The Survivor Benefit Plan / DIC offset repeal as legislative legacy.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 1948 in Corpus Christi by Dr. Hector P. Garcia. The Felix Longoria affair, the school-desegregation litigation (Delgado, Hernandez v. Texas), Mexican-American civil rights infrastructure built on a veterans' grievance.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 1920 by disabled WWI veterans in Cincinnati under Judge Robert S. Marx. The National Service Officer program — free professional claims advocacy — as the organization's identity. The post-WWI disability epidemic through the Agent Orange and PACT Act eras.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 1919 in Paris by AEF officers; federally chartered the same year. Peak membership 3.3 million in 1946. The 1944 GI Bill of Rights was Legion-driven — Harry Colmery's draft on Mayflower Hotel stationery is the structural heir of the GAR pension playbook. The largest VSO in U.S. history.
Veteran Organizations
Founded 1899 in Columbus, Ohio by Spanish-American War and Philippine-American War veterans. The "foreign service" criterion as defining identity (and structural exclusion). Bonus Army-era organizing, WWII expansion, current advocacy posture.
Veteran Organizations
Founded March 15, 1896 in New York City by 63 Civil War veterans in direct response to antisemitic claims that Jews had not served. The oldest continuously active U.S. veterans' organization. Service in every American war since; the 1933 protest march against Nazi Germany; ongoing antisemitism response.
Veteran Organizations
First entry in a standing series on American veteran organizations. How Union veterans organized themselves into a constituency five U.S. presidents needed and several feared, built the federal pension architecture, invented Memorial Day — and what they failed at along the way.
Site Updates
A note on what the new county-level decision tool is, what it cannot do, and the editorial posture behind putting federal public-domain data on the Foundation's surface. Honest attribution to the upstream CVAI bundle, plain talk about proxy inheritance and vintage drift.
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