Oxford Atlas of American Military History (review)

The Oxford Atlas of American Military History encompasses many of the best and worst tendencies in contemporary academic publishing. Edited by James C. Bradford, it consists of a text, an annotated bibliography, numerous illustrations, and over 140 digital maps. Dr. Bradford has divided the text into twenty-one primarily chronological segments. They range from "The Colonial Wars, 1512 to 1774" (Ian Steele) to "The Post-Cold War Era: 1990-" (Dennis Mills), which ends with the March 2002 Operation Anaconda. They vary in length from the thirty-four pages that Carol Reardon devotes to "The American Civil War, 1861-65," to the two pages that Bradford expends on "America's Rise To World Power, 1867-1917."

Unlike Col. John D. Elting's West Point Atlas of American Wars, the Oxford Atlas pays attention to what happened between the major conventional conflicts. Segments dealing with the Indian Wars are a welcome addition. But the decision not to consider the Indian Wars during the years 1861-65, when the last two years saw the outbreak of a general Indian war that extended into the post-Civil War period, is problematic at best. There is treatment of "The Growth of a Professional Army, 1815-60" (Samuel Watson) but not of the Navy during this period nor is the theme of professionalization followed up in later periods. The Oxford Atlas thus presents a nod to "the new military history" but it is not completely thought through or fully developed.

Generally the texts are straightforward and useful summaries of the periods they cover, written at a high level of generalization. Steele's attempt to encompass 262 years of colonial military campaigns in six pages results in little more than a list, but the fault lies with the page length assigned by the editor rather than the author. Some segments are somewhat dated in interpretation. James Kirby Martin and Christopher Smith in "The American Revolution, 1775-83," for example, ignore the rising of the New Jersey Militia in their discussion of the Trenton and Princeton campaigns (pp. 19- 20). Others, such as those by Samuel Watson on the growth of antebellum Army professionalism, Graham A. Cosmas on the Spanish-American War, David Trask on World War I, and Spencer Tucker on Korea are masterpieces of concision. The annotated bibliography is uniformly excellent, a fine starting place for further reading.

The real test of an atlas is the quality of the maps, and these unfortunately are deficient. In part this is a matter of technology. The digital maps in the Oxford Atlas are close to the state of the art (the digital maps in the new Osprey "Battle Orders" series provide much better detail), but they are inferior to the maps of the West Point Atlas. The West Point Atlas consisted of maps drawn in gray tones with the same symbols used for topographic features, to include streams, heights, and heavily wooded terrain, across all wars. Only the rectangles and broken arrows representing friendly and enemy forces in position and in advance or retreat appeared in color. The result is arresting to the eye and conveys a great amount of detailed information. In contrast, the Oxford Atlas uses maps featuring large colored areas and no consistent way of representing terrain features. Occasionally a map gives a fair amount of topographic detail, as for example Map 45b on the Battle of Chancellorsville, but such maps are the exception. Much more typical is map 126 on the Battle of Hamburger Hill, which has muddy shading to indicate hill masses and two small triangles to represent peaks. Even at their best, the maps in the Oxford Atlas are inferior to comparable maps in the West Point Atlas.

The most important difference between the two volumes is that the West Point Atlas uses text to explicate the maps while the Oxford Atlas uses maps to illustrate the text. The writers of the West Point...