Booknotes: Little Round Top at Gettysburg

New Arrival:

• Little Round Top at Gettysburg: A Reassessment of July 2, 1863 by Joseph Michael Boslet (Savas Beatie, 2026).

From the description: "Little Round Top. Three words that resonate in American military history. It was there, at one of the most visited sites on the Gettysburg battlefield, that Confederates under Maj. Gen. John B. Hood attempted to turn the left flank of the Army of the Potomac. Only the supreme efforts of Col. Strong Vincent’s brigade and a handful of others, including Brig. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren and Cols. Patrick O’Rorke and Joshua Chamberlain, saved the high ground and the Union army from potential disaster." A new history of those events, Joseph Michael Boslet's Little Round Top at Gettysburg: A Reassessment of July 2, 1863, was released a short time ago.

Revisiting this topic, which has received blanket coverage from numerous writers of considerable stature in the field, and attempting to offer something new must have been a somewhat daunting task. According to Foreword writer Scott Mingus, a frequent Gettysburg Campaign contributor himself, Boslet's approach to the topic "as a combat soldier familiar with moving through unfamiliar terrain while under hostile fire" offers a fresh perspective. Additionally, Mingus describes some of Boslet's "contentions" as being "markedly different from previous Little Round Top accounts" (pg. xii).

More from the description: His outlook informed by his own personal combat experiences, Boslet's "years of studying primary sources—including battle reports, soldiers’ narratives, and regimental histories—confirm some events while challenging others." His granular approach "meticulously reexamines the practical aspects of regimental tactics and their use of 19th-century combat methods."

Acknowledging the absence of new source discoveries, Boslet instead went to "re-mining" existing sources. In the process, he found in the current literature "gaps, misrepresentations, incomplete references, overlooked material, misstatements, and inaccurate reporting" deserving of corrective revisitation. He labels his study as a "combination thesis/treatise" that "includes some material not presented in previous studies." Boslet also describes his work as having a "tutorial aspect" in the areas of weaponry, terrain, and combat conditions. Deeming the Union side of things as having a more incomplete and inaccurate (in the author's words, "muddled") understanding compared with the well-developed Confederate point of view of the fighting, Boslet's narrative presentation is "from a slightly weighted perspective," strongly focusing on Colonel Strong Vincent's Fifth Corps brigade. The overall intention is to "get the history more right based on soldier experiences...and to offer the most reasonable explanations of what likely happened on that "hill" on July 2, 1863" (pp. xiv-xvi).