I’d read about the Chasseur jacket variation, but not the rest. And it’s probably not fair to lump ‘Zouave’ and ‘flamboyant’. Thanks for adding those great details.

Zou, zou, zou!

Brian,

Don’t know if I’d go that far or not. I might classify the 72nd PA as wearing a cross between the Zouave & the Chasseur. According to Philadelphia Brigade historian Charles Banes the uniform was “far from being as showy and foreign as that of the New York Zouaves.” To me this means no Fez, Turban or really baggy pants. Banes says their pants were “cut wide, with red stripes at the side.”

He also states:

“As uniforms wore out and were replaced, the old portions were frequently given to the camp followers and officers’ servants, and, as they were to be found in all parts of the column, it sometimes appeared as if Baxter’s men were represented everywhere. It was no small satisfaction to both officers and men that, after a few months’ experience, the zouave uniform was discarded for the regulation dress.”

Great post!

Respectively,

Mike

It is good that my wife doesn’t usually read this blog. She’d kill me if she heard me say …

It sounds like more than one rainy day’s work, but I would very much like to take a shot at getting that roster information online somehow. I’ll send you an email, and we can talk details.

(Holy crap, what am I doing?)

A few years ago I built some web forms and a review/approval scheme to take submissions on the site. It requires people sign-up as ‘members’, and about 100 people have done so to date. It’s proved effective on a small scale, but the sign-up part probably discourages some people from contributing.

I’ve also corresponded with hundreds of people over the years by snail and email. I really enjoy the contacts, and get high-quality stuff that way, but it requires a lot of hands-on effort to feed the AotW database. I’ll surely continue to do this, but won’t count on it for masses of data.

A wiki is a good alternative, but a free-form, wikipedia-type solution worries me. I need some kind of gate-keeping, along with quality and configuration control, but don’t have lot of free time to devote. I think you’re on the right track here, though. I’ll look into this further – opening the task to the larger world is key here. I’ll never get to it alone.

Thank you for the suggestion!