It's time for a study break, people.

Yup. That's what I'm doing; studying. Specifically, typing a paper due this Monday at 10 AM SHARP. And in addition to typing the paper I'm asking myself, "Why couldn't I get this done earlier?" I've asked myself that question quite a few times over the course of my long and storied academic career.

But right now it's break time, and you know what that means—history time! Admit it; you love these things. They're the highlight of your week and the ONLY good thing about Monday morning. And the question you always ask yourself as you eagerly check your email for the first time of the week is, "What's he gonna send this time?"

Well, it was a tough decision, but I finally decided what it had to be about: Chancellorsville (as in, "The Battle of"). This past weekend marked its 134th anniversary. Chancellorsville was Lee's greatest triumph; in the face of superior numbers, he divided his forces and sent a column under Stonewall Jackson marching around the right flank of the Union army. Late in the afternoon, the column of 28,000 men drove—undetected--through the woods on the Union right; then, the thick forest having silenced their approach, they burst through the trees screaming the Rebel Yell, and smashed into the surprised Yankees and drove them mercilessly back to the Rapahannock river.

It gives me chills to think about it. I'll recount the tale as told by author Bruce Catton here, but there's one trick—you have to use your imagination. Start off by imagining a field full of Yankee soldiers setting up camp for the evening, some cooking supper, some playing cards or writing a letters home; the glow of the setting sun bathing the scene in a reddish glow, immediate combat the furthest thing from anyone's mind...

"The sun was getting low. Most of the soldiers in the XI Corps, knowing that all alarms had been passed on to headquarters, assumed that the generals must know what they were doing and tried to relax. Some reginments stacked arms and began to eat supper, sitting on their knapsacks in rear of the rifle pits. Behind the lines a few details were butchering cattle. One of the German bands was playing, "The Girl I Left Behind Me," and a tune called "Come Out of the Wilderness." A private in Reily's 75th Ohio sauntered off to a spring in the wood and dipped his tim cup in the water for a drink. An officer in the 25th Ohio lay on his side in a farmyard just back of the front line, holding the end of his reins while his horse cropped the grass.

There was a ripple of laughter and cheering from the soldiers in the shallow trench along the road, and the officer sat up to see what was going on. Into a little clearing in front of th trench, innumerable deer had suddenly emerged from the wood to the west and were galloping madly toward the east, while the soldiers waved their hats and whooped. Then as the deer scampered off into the underbrush the quiet of the spring evening caved in with a tremendous crash.

Out of the forest in the west there came a handful of rifleshots, then that wild weird falsetto of the Rebel yell, followed by great rolling volleys of musketry. Down the road two Confederate cannon suddenly wheeled into view and fired, and a solid shot crashed through the branches over the head of the officer who had sat up to look at the deer. Another shot slammed into a farmhouse behind which [division commander] General Devens was lying on the grass taking his ease and the general belatedly realized that his subordinates [whose warnings he had dismissed] had known what they were talking about. And Von Gilsa's skirmish line of two German regiments looked up to see all of the Rebels in the world shouldering their way through the tangle, firing their rifles and yelling like fiends--the Germans got off a few hasty shots and then the flood rolled over them.

In a matter of minutes Devens's entire division had collapsed. There was nothing else it could have done, for Stonewall Jackson had hit it with the full power of twenty-eight thousand men, his soldiers crashing through the woodland that was supposed to be impassable by any line of battle, getting their uniforms ripped completely off at times by thorns and broken branches, but coming on regardless. Devens's men had not a chance in the world.

"There was nothing the men could do but RUN."