There are four items this month for the Speaker’s Fund. The first is a copy of Wiley Sword's Mountains Touched With Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863. The second item is a copy of Lee Kennett's Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers & Civilians During Sherman's Campaign which covers both the Atlanta Campaign and the March to the Sea, the 142nd anniversary of the conclusion of the latter campaign being this month. The third item is a copy of A Family Secret: A Novel by Eliza Francis Andrews which was reprinted by the University of Tennessee Press with a new introduction by Round Table speaker S. Kit Rushing. The fourth item is all seven issues of Civil War Times Illustrated for 2001 with articles on such subjects as guerrilla Champ Ferguson, the C. S. S. Hunley, J. E. B. Stuart, the C. S. S. Arkansas, and Confederate Brigadier General Lucius E. Polk. Two of the four of the items this month were donated to the Round Table to support the Speaker’s Fund. To those donors go our thanks. Proceeds from the Speaker’s Fund go toward bringing speakers in from outside the area. Your support of the Speaker’s Fund is appreciated.

Shawn Benge, Chief of Professional Services, Planning & Facility Management at Great Smoky Mountain National Park, Tennessee and North Carolina, has been selected to be the new Superintendent at Chickamaga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Mr. Benge is a native of Lubbock, Texas, and is a Landscape Architecture graduate of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. He began his now twenty-year National Park Service career at Big Bend National Park in Texas as a Landscape Architect and then went to the National Park Service's Denver Service Center as a Project Supervisor in 1991. He moved to the Great Smokies as a Park Planner and Landscape Architect and became the Deputy Chief of Facility Management in 2000 and Chief of Professional Services, Planning & Facility Management in 2002. He will take up his post here in Chattanooga in early February. We'll have to see if we can get him to come to one of the Round Table meetings early in his tenure as Superintendent of that nationally significant entity set aside "for the purpose of preserving and suitably marking for historical and professional military study the fields of some of the most remarkable maneuvers and most brilliant fighting in the war of the rebellion" - Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.

There appear to be only a couple of upcoming television programs on the Civil War in the next couple of weeks. C-SPAN's Book TV schedule was very incomplete when I checked it so you might want to visit it as we get closer to those dates. The History Channel listed these offerings:

December 19, Tuesday, 7 AM - "Civil War Journal: The Battle of Chattanooga"

December 19, Tuesday, 8 PM - "Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War." It is about the violence of the Reconstruction era according to the History Channel blurp. You'll note that it occurs on our meeting night, but if you are interested, you could set your VCR or stay up to see it when it re-airs that night at midnight or skip the Round Table meeting......don't do the latter. "Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War" is listed as two hours in length and as a premier.

December 26, Tuesday, 7 AM - "Civil War Journal: Zouaves"

Last month, November, was the sixth month in the experiment of distributing the Canister by email. I'm still working on learning how to do some things, like inserting graphics and imported text, and I'm, thanks to a little help, making another stab at it this month. There may be a minor difference in the appearance of the printed version of the Canister and the e-version, but the content will be the same.

Given the Holiday season and its possible effects on the mails and my having to speak in Knoxville, I'm hoping to get the Canister out a day or two early this month so hopefully every one will have it by the end of the week before the meeting.