Customer Reviews

Mapping the Civil War: Featuring Rare Maps from the Library of Congress (Library of Congress Classics)

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The Forward was the best reading, with interesting historical insights about map makers during the war, but with Chapter One, the book turned into a "one over the world" scale recap of selected battles of the war. The book displayed maps associated with a particular battle, but beyond "pretty" they were useless. I bought the book in the hope that the map reprints could be studied and perhaps compared to the West Point Atlas. But unfortunately, map details are mostly illegible as printed. They present the reader only with a sense of what a CW period map looked like. Fold out maps reproduced with some greater clarity and thus useful detail would have been preferred to the useless reprints of old civil war photographs which added nothing to a book on map making and probably made the book more expensive to produce. Disappointing.

"Mapping the Civil War", by Christopher Nelson with Brian Pohanka, is beautifully formatted and nicely illustrated, but it isn't the history of map-making in the Civil War implied by the title. The book's foreward introduces the topic of how important handmade maps were in a country without standard geodesy products. However, Christopher Nelson's history of the Civil War that follows is unremarkable in content and coverage. There is no sustained attempt to document in detail the importance of maps to the conflict. The volume does contain a nice but surprisingly limited selection of maps, sketches, and photographs from the extensive holdings of the Library of Congress, which are beautifully presented.

"Mapping the Civil War" may be worth a look for the casual reader interested in the Civil War. More serous students of the Civil War can find more detailed content elsewhere.

A well documented volume. Mr. Pohanka and Mr. Nelson have a winner with this volume. Nicely detailed in all aspects. If any one individual has full and accurate knowledge of the Civil War it is Mr. Pohanka. His books come highly recommended!