Abstract
This short study attempts something unusual by essentially ignoring the Gettysburg campaign and almost anything to do with actual combat in a concise analysis of Civil War–era Pennsylvania. It would seem to be almost self-defeating to write about the confict in a key Northern state and yet to slight the war’s biggest battle (fought within its borders, no less) and spend only a minimal amount of space conveying the actual experiences of hundreds of thousands of its residents in uniform. Yet Giesberg’s compact volume does offer real value for anyone teaching or studying this period. It succeeds in rendering some of the excellent social and political scholarship on the wartime North (including the author’s own notable work) into an easily digestible format.