Guide to the Battle of Shiloh (review)

book reviews251 fortysomething readers!), as are George Skoch's masterful maps. The endnotes and index contribute to the narrative's effectiveness and appeal to scholarly and general audiences. Gary Gallagher, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University, has again shown why he is a master editor-historian. These fresh, engrossing interpretations deserve book-length expansion. Gallagher and his colleagues have paved the way for the writing of "new" history of the "old" war. Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. University of Virginia Guide to the Battle of Shiloh. Edited by Jay Luvaas, Stephen Bowman, and Leonard Fullenkamp. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. 253. $12.95.) The format of the series known as The U.S. Army War College Guides to Civil War Battles is based on a combination of comparison eyewitness Union and Confederate reports, supplemented by detailed maps, to interpret combat tactics , maneuvers, assaults, obstacles, achievements, and failures associated with several pivotal battles of the American Civil War. In this new volume, the authors journey across the Appalachians to the West and tackle the savage and confusing Battle of Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, fought in April 1862. Following the formula used in earlier volumes on Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga, and Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, the Shiloh text is primarily based on lengthy extracts from the Official Records, to the exclusion of other primary sources. For over half of the twenty-five tour stops selected to represent random phases of the combat, several detailed and thought-provoking eyewitness impressions relate the fighting experienced at Shiloh. The combination of Federal and Confederate reports give an "on the ground," chronological context for the battle and provide insight into the physical and psychological obstacles that challenged Civil War soldiers in combat. However, at many tour stops, comparison reports for both Federal and Confederate combatants are not presented. In many sections where only Federal, or only Confederate, reports are presented, the user has no opportunity to place the one-sided extracts in context relative to the overall "face ofbattle" experienced by both armies at that location. Thus, the image of Shiloh presented for the user is unbalanced, with several important phases of combat somewhat distorted. In addition, narrative extracts from postwar publications by Confederate colonel William Preston Johnston are incorporated as if they relate firsthand experience of Shiloh. The uninformed reader could falsely assume that Colonel Johnston (son ofthe Confederate Army commanderAlbert Sidney Johnston) was present and witness to the combat he describes. In fact, Colonel Johnston was stationed in Richmond, Virginia, on April 6 and 7, 1862, where he served as a military aide to President Jefferson Davis. This fact is never acknowledged for the reader. 252CIVIL WAR HISTORY The most unfortunate problem with the book is with the troop position maps. These maps, intended to be vital resources to assist the user in reconnoitering the ground where the battle was fought, are critically flawed and contain many errors. They are difficult to read and contain no contour topography or elevation information. This provides a two-dimensional (flat) view of the rugged terrain that governed the formation and the direction of the battle, as fought, on the Shiloh plateau. A modern overlay of Shiloh National Military Park, which illustrates current conditions for both forest and fields, is used as the base map. Beyond random identification of a few principle creeks, roads, and the Tennessee River, no geographical referencing ofthe important 1862 cultural landscape features is provided. Identifying these historical landscape features—the boundaries of fields and wood lines; primary roads, farm lanes, and traces; and over seventy log homes, barns, and churches—interprets the Shiloh plateau as experienced by the soldiers in 1862. On many of the maps, a number of the primary roads and creeks are not identified; and, although 90 percent ofthe roads present today are the same historic routes used by the armies in 1862, the authors incorrectly cite these as modern roads "built to take the visitor around the battlefield ." Besides not adequately citing terrain features on the maps, several army organizations (regiments, brigades, and batteries) are incorrectly identified, and/ or, their movements and positions are incorrectly located in context to both time and space for various phases of battle...