Atlas of the Civil War: A Complete Guide to the Tactics and Terrain of Battle (National Geographic),   ISBN:9781426203473

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I purchased this book for my son -in-law who is a civil war buff.He absolutly loved the pictures and the maps. I also had a chance to look at it and was very impressed with the presentations.everything was well put together and very informative. I thought he knew everything there was to know about the civil war but even he was surprised. I would recommend this book and plan on buying the companion.

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My only complaint is that I didn't realize it had a dustcover, I thought it was just a printed cover like you would expect on an atlas. Otherwise, was exactly what I hoped for.

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this is what you expect from nat geo-a great product-i bought two-gave one as a gift-every american needs research material for the civil war available in their personal library

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Atlas of the Civil War: A Complete Guide to the Tactics and Terrain of Battle by Stephen Hyslop, Neil Kagan, and Harris Andrews, National Geographic Incorporated, 255 pages, additional readings, index, 2009, $40.00

Comprehensive is a word of which CWL is suspicious. National Geographic's Atlas of the Civil War A Comprehensive Guide to the Tactics and Terrain of Battle is pretty close to comprehensive though.

Organized as a chronological account with eighty-five rare period maps, this atlas offers the map maker's history of the American Civil War. Campaign maps surveying whole regions and strategies, contemporary battlefield charts used by Union and Confederate generals, commercial maps produced for a newspapers are the majority of the maps in the atlas. The key moments of major battles are pinpointed by National Geographic's cartographers using satellite data to render the terrain with astonishing detail in 35 maps created for the atlas.

In addition, there are over 300 documentary photographs, battlefield sketches, paintings, and artifacts bear eyewitness testimony to the war, history's first to be widely captured by photography. Users of William J. Miller's Great Maps of the Civil War: Pivotal Battles and Campaigns, Earl McElfresh's Mapping For Stonewall and Maps and Mapmakers of the Civil War, the Atlas to the Official Records, the West Point Atlas of the Civil War, and the numerous online map collections of universities and libraries will be content with the depth and clarity of reproductions in this atlas. Those coming to Civil War era maps and map making for the first and second time could hardly do better that the National Geographic's atlas. Those looking for a large format nearly comprehensive book on the military aspects of the war will find in this big, handsome coffee table book to be hefty both in its weight and its contents.

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If you're a Civil War buff, student, teacher this book is a must - BUT many of the graphics, trying to look "of the period" are a bit obscure. The maps from the Natinal Geographic are better. Some of the "battles" were a bit more than skirmishes; still people died, were wounded and subsequent battles were often determined by these skirmishes.
To understand the war, you must have a fair knowledge of "the west" i.e. TN LA etc. This book does a good job with that.
The VA peninsula campaigns and Gettysburg are well described and fairly easy to follow