BTC Notes: A Detailed New Way to Look at Siege of Petersburg Materials

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at The Siege of Petersburg Online: Beyond the Crater.

Introducing BTC Notes at The Siege of Petersburg Online

BTC Notes is a new feature at The Siege of Petersburg Online: Beyond the Crater which takes a detailed look at Petersburg Campaign materials such as books, articles, essays, maps, etc. The idea is to gather important information from a resource in a post to use for further research down the road. The first post in this series focuses on Earl J. Hess’ new book Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg.

Each post will contain some portion of the following:

• Book/Article/Essay/Map Title
• Author (if applicable)
• Important Points:
  1. Chapter Summaries: Important points made by the author throughout the book/article/essay are listed here with page numbers for future reference.
  2. Unit Strengths: Any mentions of unit strengths from armies down to companies/batteries will be listed along with page numbers for use in the Order of Battle pages.
  3. Unit Armament: Any mentions of unit weapons will be listed along with page numbers for use in the Order of Battle pages.
  4. Unit Commanders: Exactly who commanded a given regiment/battery (and in some cases on the Confederate side even brigades) at a given point in time is a source of much confusion for those studying the Siege of Petersburg. For that reason, any mention of regimental/battery commanders on a certain date will be noted along with page numbers for use in Order of Battle and Leaders pages in the future.
  5. Unit Performance on a Given Day: How commands performed during a given action will be listed here for future possible use in original articles here at Beyond the Crater.
  6. Other: Any other notable information will be listed in this catch all area.

As BTC Notes posts are finished, they will also appear on their corresponding book page in the Bibliography section of Beyond the Crater where applicable. See the Into the Crater page for an idea of how this is going to work. In addition, all of the BTC Notes pages will all be collected in a News and Notes “BTC Notes” sub-page.