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BOOK REVIEWS185 of civilian institutions, the importance of top administrators is overemphasized at the expense of key faculty members. Real vitality comes up from the bottom as often as it flows down from the top. Todorich has good material on some of the long-service professors, notably William A. Chauvenet, who provided the core and the continuity to the academy's scholastic program . This reveiwer would have been happy to see more regarding their philosophies of what an academy education should have been and their roles in shaping the educational enterprise. Likewise, The Spirited Years has a fine, but too brief, section comparing the Naval Academy's education with that offered at pre-Civil War United States colleges (pp. 159-63). Such parallel investigation is sorely needed, as is light on how education at the American service academies related to military education in the principal European countries. Too often historians of Annapolis and West Point have written as though their institutions existed in sanitary isolation from contemporary developments in United States higher education and military education abroad. Histories of educational institutions can leave the reader unsatisfied, often because it is difficult to get at the essential business that has gone on in these establishments. Precisely how were maturing individuals shaped by their encounters with individual teachers and with an institution 's collective identity? It is not enough to say that the students were changed; the historian should seek to discover the means by which that change was effected. In chapter 6 Todorich makes a strong effort to do this; but, as has been the case with other historians of nineteenth-century American colleges, the more ready accessibility of source materials regarding formal institutional development and student disciplinary problems makes these subjects stand taller on the historical page than the ongoing , but less dramatic, business of day-to-day education. Military education in the nineteenth-century United States should continue to be an open and promising field for original and creative research that will build on excellent foundations exemplified by The Spirited Years. Christopher McKee Grinnell College Grant and Lee: The Virginia Campaigns, 1864-1865. By William A. Frassanito. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983. Pp. 442. $24.95.) After conducting the first scholarly analysis of the Civil War's epic battle in Gettysburg: A Journey in Time, William Frassanito turned back to Antietam: The Photographic Legacy ofAmerica's Bloodiest Day. Now he has leapfrogged to the climactic military events in the eastern theater. While disclaiming any intent to write "a definitive history" (p. 23) of these operations, he has in fact provided a useful summary. He is somewhat less successful in enriching his narrative with human interest than he was in his works on specific battles, but he does develop a touching case study of the brief army career of an obscure private, Frederick 186 CIVIL WAR HISTORY H. Kronenberger of the Second New Jersey Infantry. Obviously the author's main stress is on the photographs of the Virginia campaigns. He includes enough fine pictures to make the book an outstanding photographic history of these events. Frassanito states, however, that his purpose instead is to present "a history of the photographic coverage of those campaigns" (p. 422). Consequently, as in his earlier books, he analyzes negatives and original prints to identify the specific photographers , locations, subject matter, time and dates of the pictures. Often he offers a modern photograph to match a given view. His inability to do so in several instances because of overgrown terrain is a reminder of the extent of reforestation east of the Appalachians. Frassanito's book is organized chronologically in the first and last parts and topically by subject in the mid-section dealing with the siege of Petersburg. Within this pattern, it centers especially on the work of three main groups of photographers, among them the employees of Matthew B. Brady, but the author takes some pains to hit at the now somewhat battered myth that Brady, either as man or company, was the principal photographer of the Civil War. As Frassanito amply demonstrates, significant parts of the record of the 1864 operations were the work of two other groups, the employees of...

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