American Heritage battle maps of the Civil War

For those who travel in person or by book to the sites of famous Civil War battles, here is a resource that will help them visualize events. There definitely is more tactical information here, including aerial photographs, than was available to wartime generals, some of whom fought without benefit of any maps of the terrain. Many of the maps included here are those created by David Greenspan for American Heritage in 1951. A summary of each battle or campaign is provided by O'Shea. He also supplies an overview of naval campaigns and brief biographies of eight Civil War generals. ~--Denise Perry Donavin

Mapping the Civil War is a cottage industry that began during the war and has prospered ever since. In official reports and popular histories issued after the war, numerous maps gave military movement and battles a geographical clarity and purpose they often lacked for the soldiers fighting. In this useful compendium of maps, largely made up of David Greenspan's pictorial maps originally drawn for Bruce Catton's American Heritage Illustrated History of the Civil War (1960) and various hand-drawn and -printed wartime maps, the importance of maps in military history and in the history of the war becomes evident. The maps cover 15 major battles/campaigns, from Bull Run to Nashville--each introduced by a serviceable description of the engagement and supplemented by illustrations. Still, this book offers little that is new or surprising. Recommended only for those libraries that lack the Catton volume and The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War (1978) or other reliable collections of Civil War maps.-- Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.