Booknotes: Antietam National Battlefield

New Arrival:
• Antietam National Battlefield by Kevin R. Pawlak (Arcadia Pub, 2019).

Arcadia's Images of America series volumes are a mainstay of bookstores everywhere. Not so much anymore, but I used to also see them regularly in drugstores and even supermarkets. Focused on local history of all possible kinds, the books convey that history through captioned contemporary photographs supplemented with images of historic lithographs, maps, and other illustration types. The series is populated with many titles having Civil War connections, the latest being Antietam National Battlefield guide Kevin Pawlak's Antietam National Battlefield.

From the description: "Approximately 110,000 soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies fought along the banks of Antietam Creek in the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. In 12 hours of fighting, approximately 23,000 men fell, either killed, wounded, or missing, forever scarring the landscape around the town of Sharpsburg. Established as the Antietam Battlefield Site in 1890, Antietam National Battlefield became a National Park Service landmark in 1933. The park grew from 33 acres in the 1890s to encompassing over 3,000 acres today. Some of the Civil War's most recognizable landmarks now sit within its boundaries, including Dunker Church, Bloody Lane, and Burnside Bridge. The events that occurred across the fields and woodlots around Sharpsburg and along Antietam Creek bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to Antietam National Battlefield every year."

Compiled "from the collections of Antietam National Battlefield Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the United States Army Heritage and Education Center, private collections, and more," the photographs and illustrations document the Antietam battle, battlefield, cemetery, memorials, monuments, and 150 years of commemoration events. There's also a Postcards of America supplement.