The Timeline of the Civil War [With Poster]

The bottom of each page of the book contains a time-line of the events covered on a month-by-month basis, throughout the war. This time-line only takes up about 20% of each page, with the rest of the page taken up with text and pictures, in roughly equal amounts. The result is an overview of the war, but not an in depth treatment. It is a nice supplement to more detailed studies, or a good choice for someone who only wants an outline and time-line of events. The book also contains a foldout time-line poster. Note - As I was posting this review I noticed another review that questioned the accuracy of the contents. I checked the points that were cited and I do not feel that they are quite as serious as they appear to be. I checked the reference to the Seward photograph and the other reviewer is correct, the photograph on page 200 is not of William H. Seward, a fact that I failed initially to notice. This error should have been particularly apparent, since not only did Seward not wear a beard, but also the photo looks nothing like him. Bearded or not Seward, had a particularly distinctive nose, which the person in the photograph clearly lacks. I believe (based on other photographs) that this is a picture of his son Fred, who was seriously wounded by the assassin who tried to kill his father. In all fairness, the caption of the photograph only says that, "William H Seward survived an assassination attempt", not that the photograph is of Seward, so it could just as likely have been referring to Fred Seward who was also injured in the attack. The reviewer is also right regarding the caption referring to John Buford on page 120. Buford is not the figure on the far right; he is the prominent, seated, individual in the center of the picture, so this is only a slight error. As for as the misidentification of the soldiers on P 126 as being confederate; again the reviewer is correct, but the rest of the caption refers Brady photographing union soldiers, so the error is only of "misspeaking". All these cited problems refer to photo captions, which may not have been provided by the author of the book. Nonetheless, the errors point to sloppiness and leads one to question the accuracy of the rest of the material in the book. I hope that these errors and others will be corrected in another edition of this book. I was going to give the book five stars, but owing to the noted errors I have downgraded it to four stars. (Had I felt them to be more serious, I would have downgraded the rating further.) The edition that I have has a different cover from what is shown accompanying this item, but the correspondence of the photographs noted above and the fact that the author is the same tells me that it is the same book, but just a slightly different edition.