Powered by 550 Horses, a Modern Mad Dash from Washington to Gettysburg

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The famous American Civil War battle of Gettysburg took place over three days in the beginning of July in 1863. Readers don't often realize that the battle was really a part of a larger military campaign, an invasion of the north by Confederate rebel infantry and cavalry, and the campaign took place over a month, from early June to early July.

The modern adventure novel, Gettysburg Passage, can also be thought of as a brief "campaign" - or maybe better as a mad dash! Several characters, lead by Rick Reynolds, a high tech sales rep living near Washington, are forced to deal with shocking discovery, emerging danger and harrowing pursuit that relentlessly pushes them mysteriously towards Gettysburg. The novel covers a few action-packed days in the lives of Rick and his friends.

The Gettysburg battlefield is very close to America's capital - less than an hour if traffic's light. Nearly 150 years ago, the trip north took rebel forces weeks. But the men and women in Gettysburg Passage need only a few days to cover the very same ground - if they can keep from getting killed!

For several people in the novel, being able to jump into a 2011 Ford Shelby Cobra Mustang GT500, the offspring of a famous racer, might make the trip a little more brief. You see, the sleek, powerful muscle car is powered by 550 horses and doesn't stop for water, or to graze! But life can be perilous at 120 miles per hour and faster, especially when the bad guys are chasing you in a spectacularly fast Dodge Challenger.

To learn more about how some everyday people get sucked into trying to save modern civilization, while dodging a few bullets related to the Gettysburg Campaign, check out Gettysburg Passage by John Callahan, available from Amazon.com for $2.99.

Action, adventure, history, fantasy and a touch of science fiction, all in a fast-paced contemporary novel.

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1863 Around the World and Just Outside Your Door

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1863.

President Lincoln freed African American slaves. King George assumed the throne in Greece. Thomas Crapper invented a new toilet in England. Colombia was formed. Cambodia became a French Protectorate. The Red Cross was organized in Geneva. Rugby was invented. Coastal Holland experienced devastating floods. In America, it was a period of constant war. North versus South. Federal versus Native American.

No matter where you live in the world, how would you react if a little bit of 1863 suddenly visited you one day? Maybe it would be something you spotted just as dusk was settling in. Or maybe it would arrive with a knock at your front door. Or perhaps you were lost and directions given pointed to something from 1863. Perhaps the experience would be fleeting, a few moments at most.

Would you tell someone? Or would you ignore it and hope it wouldn't be repeated? These are questions that characters in Gettysburg Passage face. They are modern men and women, living today,  just like you. Suddenly their world changes just a little bit. What should they do? What would you do? What if your decision could change the fate of the world. Would you act? Even if you faced great danger?

To learn more, go to Amazon.com and look up Gettysburg Passage, by John Callahan. Just $2.99 by download to your Kindle, PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android smart phone. It's easy. Do it!

Tags: ancient civilizations, Sumer, Babylon, Indo-European, Greece, Hittites

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Spectacular advanced ancient civilization

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A central thread of this blog is that there are a million spectacular, jaw-dropping discoveries that are yet to be made about our very distant past. Some of these discoveries are derivative, like the remnants of a lost Roman city uncovered in the inner reaches of deeply forested, boggy Wales countryside or evidence of an Odysseus-related castle on the wind-swept Isle of Ithaca.

Other finds are totally new. In today's Washington Post, a front-page story describes how previous archaeological dogma is being thrown out the window as scientists realize the Amazon rain forest was home to sophisticated ancient civilizations that sustained relatively large towns and supported effective large-scale agriculture.

The novel Gettysburg Passage, available from amazon.com (the online store, not the rain forest) also throws dogma out the window. The novel hints at an advanced, ancient civilization that existed prior to those (Sumerians, Hittites, Egyptians, etc.) traditionally studied today. The older civilization was in fact the trailblazer and innovator for key technological and religious concepts currently held dear. But the novel's proto civilization faced a grave danger to its very existence. Remarkably, a key to its survival is found today. Can people and decisions made today have an effect on the distant past?  Gettysburg Passage attempts to answer this question in a modern action adventure novel.

What the heck. The only thing at risk is the history of Western Civilization and our very existence. Available as a $5.99 download for Kindle, or as a Kindle app on smartphones, iOS, Mac or PC.

To learn even more, read more of this blog or go to YouTube and type in Gettysburg Passage.

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Ancient Civilizations Under Our Feet

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As I was bike riding a couple of days ago I passed a woods and, despite my downhill speed, my eyes were drawn deep into the trees lit in pleasing patterns by late afternoon sunlight. As I often do during such moments, I imagined what had occurred in that spot over the years: farming, hunting, fishing, burial grounds perhaps, military skirmishes involving troops from the Civil and Revolutionary wars, interactions between native peoples and settlers, and stretching back tens of thousands of years, maybe activities from lost societies that we have no conception of yet.

As an avid reader of history, conventional wisdom tells us that the first glimmers of organized society are only 12,000 years old or so, with basic settlements, social hierarchy, crude agriculture and the domestication of animals emerging very slowly as the world thawed and the glaciers retreated. This framework works for my book series but I would still be thrilled if evidence appeared of relatively advanced societies -- along the lines of Cretan or Minoan civilization -- were found to exist 20,000 or even 40,000 years ago. Wouldn't that make for some interesting plot lines?

News out of the U.K. this weekend is that the recent dry weather there has caused literally thousands of ancient settlement sites, from Roman ruins to settelments thousands of years earlier, to suddenly become evident because of variations in crop coloring. Soil over some ancient settlement structures, like ditches or holding ponds, may hold moisture somewhat more efficiently and produce a deeper green. An old wall, on the other hand, might rob surface crops of moisure in specific patterns, giving another clue. From the air, faint patterns of old forts, walls, ditches and settlements fairly jump out to an observer or a camera, the English Heritage organization reports.

The more experts look, the more patterns of human exploration and settlement are found. So, to my mind and imagination, rarely is a woods just a woods. If you look and listen closely, the buzz of prior human activity becomes almost a roar. If you'd like to explore how several people from the Washington area reluctantly get involved in often harrowing activities strongly influenced by an obscure ancient civilization, please check out the book Gettysburg Passage now available on amazon.com.

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Palace of Odysseus Discovered in Ithaca

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Odysseus was the mythical king of Ithaca from roughly the Eighth Century B.C. and a central player in both the Illiad and the Odyssey. Literary experts have long taught that he never existed but was simply a fictional superhero in the Greek national epics. Isn't it surprising then, as archaeologists dig ever deeper into the past, that a royal palace has been excavated on the island of Ithaca, in the Ionian Sea, just where Homer said it would be and the remains date to....the Eighth Century B.C. There is a facinating story on all this just published in the Telegraph in the U.K. by Nick Squires. (Why do all of my best links come from the U.K.?). The link follows below. As I remind my readers, the world as we know it was built from and is supported by past civilizations. Easily 95% of the knowledge related to ancient civilizations has been lost. But we can use information fragments, such as the work being done by the archaeologists from the University of Ioannina, to expand our imaginations and dream of what came before us. In my new book from Amazon.com, Gettysburg Passage, people find an artifact from a past civilization, as luck would have it, under some bushes not far from the White House. It is an ancient royal mace, or perhaps a cheesy copy. But the artifact reveals a world they had no idea was possible and tests their smug assumptions about what matters. They are quickly confronted with a need to take action -- or possibly perish. Why not download the book and find out what happens?

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Serbian Site May Have Hosted First Copper Makers

In an article in Science News of June 25, 2010,  it is reported that a Serbian location may have housed the first copper makers,

....the remains of a  settlement in southeastern Europe is approximately 7,000 years old....oldest dated copper smelting...

...but maybe advanced metallurgy techniques are much older and were in use by even older civilizations....maybe an interesting thesis for Book 2, huh?