In 1959, the University of Chicago Press published Luvaas' dissertation on the lessons learned by British, French and Prussian military observers of the Civil War, "The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance"; this was republished in 1988 by University of Kansas. In this study, he examined the American Civil War through a foreign soldier's eyes, and found the view very different from those presented by American soldiers. Luvaas offered a careful account of the conclusions of the European military observers, particularly the Prussian, British and French. These observers eventually helped to shape tactics of World War I and World War II, but not, as previously believed, the Second Schleswig War between Prussia and Denmark or the Franco-Prussian War.