If you savor American history, particularly the years of the Civil War, can you ever have enough books to help understand what transpired during those bloody years? In Civil War Places, Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of its Leading Historians, we’re treated to the interpretation of various Civil War sites by a roster of historians. It’s an interesting and unusual approach to Civil War history in that the contributors each based their essay around a location that resonated with them.

For instance, William Blair is a research professor and director of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. He centered his essay at Arlington National Cemetery, in an area that, as he puts it, “is a silent corner of the cemetery, far from the tourists who stream up the hill to the Kennedy gravesite and Arlington House.”

“…The headstones make the greatest impression as they sweep up, then down, and then up again along the rolling terrain,” Blair tells us. “Puzzling to a newcomer are the words ‘citizen’ and ‘civilian’ on the headstones in what is supposed to be a military cemetery. Yet they tell a story central to Arlington and mirror an even larger story of black Americans who lived through the transitions from slavery to segregation.”

Caroline Janney is a professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. She chose Burnside’s Bridge at the Antietam Battlefield as the backdrop for her essay. In it, she recalled her visit to Antietam, in 1992 with her grandparents, and how that bridge so struck her that she photographed it, a photo that now hangs in her office at the university (and graces the book's cover).

The photo, Janney writes, brings so many memories swirling back to her whenever she looks at it. Memories of that visit with her grandparents to Antietam, how she chose Antietam for her junior history class project, how it influenced her decision to focus her graduate career on the Civil War. And it gives her pause, to think of the soldiers' impression of that place.

“As I reflect on the way in which this place has continued to change meaning for me, I can’t help but consider how the same must have been true for the men who fought there,” writes Janney. “The bridge surely evoked some mixture of determination and angst from the men of the 11th Connecticut as they stormed it in 1862. But how did the survivors experience the place when they returned to dedicate their regimental monument on October 8, 1894?  Some must have paused to think of those no longer with them, those who had fallen along the banks of the Antietam or on another bloody field.

“Equally as important,” the historian goes on, “more than thirty years later, the survivors had a better grasp of what had been happening elsewhere on the field in 1862 – something they could not have comprehended during the battle.”

For those of us who have visited Civil War sites, walked the grounds, looked at the battle lines and the vantage points, it can be a struggle to comprehend the entirety of the events that took place. This rich collection of essays helps us frame those perspectives today, more than 150 years after the Civil War redefined the United States.