Review - " The Antietam Battlefield Atlas " by Brad Butkovich

[The Antietam Battlefield Atlas by Brad Butkovich (Historic Imagination, 2023). Paperback, 124 color maps, orders of battle, endnotes, bibliography. 172 pages. ISBN:978-1-7325976-5-5. $49.95]

Brad Butkovich is the author of the creatively conceived Visual Antietam series, a three-volume reissue of the battle sections of the seminal Ezra Carman manuscript. What made Butkovich's edition of Carman's work stand out were his enhancements: excellent original maps that were in turn supplemented by modern battlefield photographs taken at the approximate time of the action depicted. Newly spawned from that earlier work, and significantly boosted through the use of color, is Butkovich's The Antietam Battlefield Atlas.

This Antietam atlas study, designed to be handy for both armchair reading and battlefield tramping, is divided into eight main battle sections. The first chapter covers initial contact on September 16 and the rest move on from there to comprehensively address the main fighting on the 17th from beginning to end. Each chapter begins with a brief narrative summary of events that is followed by maps tracing the fighting at frequent time intervals. Other sources were consulted, but the volume's research is most extensively based on the O.R. and 1862 Maryland Campaign authority Tom Clemens's exhaustively edited edition of the Carman manuscript (a multi-volume project that was completed in 2017).

Each map is presented in full color and fills most of the generous space provided by the book's 8.5" x 11" page dimensions. Terrain detail is impressive, with salient battlefield features such as buildings, woods, orchards, rock outcroppings, haystacks, and fields circumscribed by roads and multiple fence types. Contour lines drawn at 10' intervals offer a strong sense of the battlefield's elevation nuances without over cluttering the maps. At the bottom of each map is an approximate time (or time range) stamp followed by numbered event stamps describing the action depicted in the drawing. There's good portability, and these bullet point-style text descriptors are great for those having only a few hours for in-person battlefield exploration. As is standard for books of this kind, regiments and batteries are the base scale. An overall winning combination, the cartography is deeply informative, easy to follow, technically strong, and aesthetically pleasing.

Unit placements and timing of events are always open to differences in interpretation both large and small, even with the war's most extensively documented battles (like this one). It's true that we already have a benchmark Antietam atlas published a decade ago that's solidly grounded in current research (see Bradley Gottfried's The Maps of Antietam); however, there's every reason for scholars and enthusiasts alike to pick up a copy of Butkovich's The Antietam Battlefield Atlas both on its own merits and for side-by-side comparison.