Guide to the Battle of Shiloh

Guide to the Battle of Shiloh. Edited by Jay Luvaas, Stephen Bowman, and Leonard Fullenkamp. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, I996. Pp. 253. $ I 2.95.)

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 I 862.

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...