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Reviews
These Men Were Heroes Once
The Sixty-Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry
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By Carolyn S. Bridge
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(West Lafayette, Ind.: Twin Publications, 2005. Pp. xvi, 414. Maps, biographies, rosters, index, CD of regimental poetry and song. $24.95.)
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| It is appropriate that Carolyn S. Bridge is listed as compiler rather than editor of this volume on the 69th Indiana Volunteer Infantry. She provides only five pages of preface and introduction and offers occasional footnotes and headnotes. The book consists of a wide variety of documents including an 1891 record of the regiment's activities; reminiscences told at reunions and published in the proceedings; poetry read at reunions; letters sent to family and to newspapers; soldier biographies; a bibliography, timeline, and map; company rosters; and a ten-minute compact disk of regimental poetry and song. Soldiers' reminiscences and letters occupy about half of the volume's four hundred pages, but the texts have not benefited from many editorial emendations. Bridge composed the brief biographies of the infantrymen, but they are nowhere summarized into a collective biography that would offer social statistics about the regiment. In short, what this project lacks is editorial and scholarly ambition, beyond the energy required to compile materials and write up facts. Instead, it remains for the reader to put together a comprehensive understanding of the regiment's accomplishments, their larger significance, and their connection to existing scholarship. Indeed, this volume is more a regimental scrapbook than a regimental history. However, it can be a useful and interesting scrapbook. |
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