Battle Maps of the Civil War (American Heritage)
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., PhiladelphiaCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.