Dave Tabler's first book was a Civil War book. Fresh out of college with degrees in art history and photojournalism - earned despite being told he needed a 'Plan B' - Tabler contributed the photography for The Illustrated History of American Civil War Relics, learning to work with museum curators, private collectors, and white cotton gloves. Along the way he met a man in the Shenandoah Valley who played the musical saw, a Knoxville fellow who specialized in collecting barbed wire, and Tom Dickey, brother of the man who wrote Deliverance.That early immersion in American history has shaped everything since. In 2006 Tabler launched AppalachianHistory.net, now reaching 375,000 readers a year. After moving to Delaware in 2010, he became smitten with the state's rich past and turned that fascination into six books: Delaware Before the Railroads, Delaware from Railways to Freeways, Delaware from Freeways to E-ways, Delaware at Christmas, Delaware Behaving Badly, and Delaware Keepers.Delaware's Forgotten Cavalry: A Failure of Command is where those two threads finally meet - a Civil War book, deeply rooted in Delaware soil, drawing on the curatorial and primary-source skills he's been sharpening since the white-cotton-gloves days.