Out in paper today: The Antietam Campaign, an essay collection.Would you buy a book with that title? Or would you read the title as a foretaste of catastrophic analytic failure by its editor?
You might even wonder if there were enough books on the Maryland Campaign already, but then you'd be making the same mistake Gary "Stop the Madness" Gallagher made when he but the kibosh on more Stuart at Gettyburg publishing.
Gallagher happens to be the editor of this Antietam "madness" by the way.
A few years ago in a Usenet post not indexed on Google Groups, Brooks Simpson recounted how he had been solicited to contribute to this collection. He thought he was telling an anecdote complimentary to Gary Gallgher. He said he (Brooks Simpson) proposed to show McClellan had reason to pause after Antietam and that Gallagher, emphasizing strong disagreement with such an idea, encouraged the essay's submission anyway.
An editor with strong opinions allows a much-published author and scholar his own view. Oh, how impressive.
Assuming that Simpson's piece would be the only reasonable offering in this project and still suffering indigestion from the collection of rants that comprised Gallagher's first "Antietam Campaign" collection, I decided to give this title a pass. I stopped the madness. Now I'm counting on one of his friends to tell Gallagher why there never was anything called "The Antietam Campaign."