The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged

The University of Tennessee Press has just reissued one of the seminal works on the battle of Shiloh; one that, amazingly, had been out of print for almost a century. The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged was written by David W. Reed, a Shiloh veteran, and represented the official version of the battle by the Shiloh Battlefield Park Commission. It first saw print in 1902 as a rather dull hardcover (plain black boards, no dj) that was published in an edition of 2500 copies. The book was reprinted in a 1909 second edition that corrected some minor errors which was in turn, reprinted for the last time in 1913.

As you can see here, surviving copies are indeed hard to come by, which helped give way to this long overdue reprint. Its a very nice production that features Timothy Smith's excellent introduction to Reed's cornerstone work. A second highlight is a CD-Rom that contains Reed's masterful battle line and troop movement maps. I've just submitted a much longer review of this work to Civil War News which will appear in an upcoming issue. This one belongs on every Shiloh student's bookshelf.