Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.
Gee, thanks for the indirect link. It's driven a good bit of traffic to my blog. One small quibble: The American Civil War was between the U.S.A. and a breakaway C.S.A. There never was nor could be a "United States Confederacy"! "The (American) Confederacy" works, and so does "the Confederate states" but "U.S. Confederacy" sounds bizarre.