The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield.

The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield. By Timothy B. Smith. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 206. $34.00, ISBN 1-57233-466-5.)

The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield is a collection of Timothy B. Smith's essays on the battle, most of which were previously published. They fall into two categories: those that highlight neglected aspects of the battle and those that discuss the construction of the battle's history. Together, they add to our understanding of what Ulysses S. Grant termed the most "persistently misunderstood" battle of the war and explain how it became so misunderstood (p. 1).

A member of the Shiloh National Military Park's staff, Smith makes extensive use of primary sources at the park and other collections to build on his previous book, This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park (Knoxville, 2004). The chapters explaining how David W. Reed and DeLong Rice--the park's first historians--constructed a detailed narrative of the battle, deserve particular attention. Reed, a veteran of the battle, and Rice, a romantic poet who succeeded him, built and shaped a vision of the battle that dominated scholarship throughout the twentieth century. Despite their painstaking efforts, myths and inaccuracies entered their work and skewed their account of the battle (particularly regarding the fighting at the Hornet's Nest in which Reed took part). These mistakes were embellished over the years by other writers and the veterans they interviewed.

In one chapter, Smith disposes of several of these myths. He argues that the Confederates achieved only limited surprise, Lew Wallace did not get his division lost, the Hornet's Nest was not the pivotal action of the battle, and Benjamin Prentiss was not the hero of that action. In a similar vein, he believes that victory was not within the Confederacy's grasp at the end of the first day and that Albert Sidney Johnston's death did little to change the battle's outcome. Other chapters trace a Confederate brigade through the battle and its first taste of combat, the Union navy's role in the fighting, and the Union's advance on Corinth after the battle. Smith also discusses the historiography of the battle, which he traces through four successive interpretations: that of the officers and soldiers who fought at Shiloh, the Reed/ Rice school, the Johnston school, which considered the general's death the key event in the battle, and a recent revisionist school in which Smith places himself.

While several chapters leave the reader wanting more, this is a good book with which to begin one's study of Shiloh, and even those familiar with the battle will likely find something new in it.

STEPHEN K. STEIN

University of Memphis