Our War: New Year, a thank you to readers

Looking down from Broadway at W. 96th St. on one of the last days of 2014/

Just after midnight, New Year's fireworks over Manhattan.

As the New Year clicked in, this blog surpassed 58,000 pageviews. Thank you for reading.

I’m also nearing my 300th post. Because I’m now working full-time again, you can expect more variety and less volume on this blog. The blog began with a fairly tight focus on New Hampshire’s Civil War experience, but almost from the beginning I wrote occasional posts about other interests: the World Wars, poetry and poets, art, music, personal experience.

Recently, in a long series of posts that starts here, I told my family’s World War II and postwar experiences through letters. It is a story with a sad ending, and if you missed it, I hope you’ll make time to give it a look.

Meanwhile, I wish you all a Happy New Year. The photo above was taken from our balcony looking south toward midtown Manhattan. We were glad to witness the scene from a distance rather than freeze with the throng in Times Square.

Here are the top 25 posts on the Our War blog from the last two-plus years on the basis of pageviews. The order has changed modestly since I last posted a list in November. The range of pageviews now runs from 1,184 for No. 1 to 278 for the three tied at No. 25.

1. Killing the Southerners with kindness (1)

2. The long American tradition of racist speech (2)

3. Urgent! Telegram from Gettysburg (4)

4. A Gettysburg veteran who knew the battlefield by heart (5)

5. Why couldn’t Franklin Pierce just keep his mouth shut? (3)

6. Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? (6)

7. Farewell, my teacher (7)

8. Exeter’s Civil War general (8)

9. A Gettysburg journal (part 3) (9)

10. The rise and fall of James Willis Patterson (11)

11. Unpacking the new ‘Gettysburg’ (10)

12. One school’s proud Civil War heritage (12)