In case you're wondering, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is right around the corner. Well, almost. The sesquicentennial will be celebrated from 2011-2015, and the folks in Virginia are already started to plan for the event.
    The folks in Spotsylvania County, home to the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, recently decided to form a planning committee for the affair. Russ Smith, superintendent of the military park, says it's not too early to start planning. After all, he told The Free Lance Star of Fredericksburg, planning for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding took a decade.
    Meanwhile, a historian says a recently discovered cache of papers paint a new, and interesting, portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
    "I think historians have oversimplified him as modest Christian gentleman," Elizabeth Brown Pryor told The Free Lance Star this past Thursday after lecturing on General Lee at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. "He was vulnerable, sometimes baffled, not the simple, decisive, heroic stone icon we've come to think of."