Battle of Bull Run

"The Battle of Bull Run" is a juvenile history of the first big battle of the Civil War aimed at junior high students. Deborah Kops does more than describe the battle, starting with the plans for the battle laid out by Union General Irvin McDowell and the counter strategy of Confederate General P.T. Beauregard. The book is broken down into discrete units that deal with the changing tide of affairs from the Union march to Bull Run and the actual fighting, broken down into the morning period when the Union held the upper hand and the afternoon, when the Rebels routed the Yankees. The thing I like best about this book is how attention is paid to details. A sidebar notes that the battle was called Bull Run by the Union and Manassas by the Confederates, goes on to explain that the North named battles after landmarks and the South after the towns in which they were thought. Other sidebars deal with Civil War Spies, the Commanders on both sides, and the Civil War as the First Modern war. When describing the Commanders, Kops focuses not only on biographical information but also on key aspects of their leadership style (Johnston: cautious fighter but gifted defensive commander). The book has photographs or etchings of the battle as well as of most of the key people mentioned, and a pair of battlefield maps. The end result is a book that is both concise and informative. "The Battle of Bull Run" is part of the Triangle Histories books on the Civil War. The idea here is that there are books representing three topics: Battles (Antietam, Vicksburg), Leaders (John Brown, Ulysses S. Grant), and Presidents (Andrews Johnson, Abraham Lincoln). Each title in the collection interweaves and overlaps with others in various ways: e.g., during the Vicksburg campaign Lincoln was under great pressure to replace the Grant as commander. This makes sense, but there is nothing explicit it these books that makes the links any more explicit than they would be in any other juvenile history or biography. But this ends up not mattering because this book stands well on its own, whether young students move on to the other volumes or not.