Booknotes: Roads to Antietam, Third Edition

New Arrival:

• Roads to Antietam, Third Edition by John W. Schildt (Antietam Inst, 2024).

With its release of a third edition of John Schildt's Roads to Antietam, the Antietam Institute has now added classic reprints to its current stable of publications, which includes the biannual Antietam Journal and yearly "member incentive" original books.

Prior editions of Schildt's book are the original 1985 hardcover from Antietam Publications and the 1997 version from Burd Street Press (or at least that's what Google Books tells me). As of this writing, I don't have a cover image to share here and there aren't any book page links available for this particular title on the institute's website yet. I would imagine that those will become available soon. The third edition is a hardcover with dust jacket (the binding being similar to that of the institute's most recent release, From Frederick to Sharpsburg).

Here is the publisher's description from an earlier edition: "An informative guide to the actual routes followed by armies of both North and South and the experiences of the men before the crucial battle. Roads to Antietam is the story of the armies marching to battle in September 1862 and what that experience was like for the men in the ranks and the civilians along the routes. Clouds of dust, marching men, the rumble of wagons, and the late summer heat and haze added to the noise and confusion of hundreds of units snaking their way up from Virginia and the camps around Washington, D.C. Soldiers from the North and South wondered where they were going as they marched along the roads of Maryland."

Not having available an earlier version for direct comparison, I don't know anything about the quantity of material that has been added over the years between editions or if the many illustrations present here in this copy are new to the third edition. That said, Tom McMillan's new foreword does point out that the third edition contains an "addition of extensive primary source material and an updated series of distinctive maps..." (pg. viii). The newly commissioned maps from Aaron Holley are six in total.