I just finished one of the best histories I have ever read, and want to recommend enthusiastically to my readers. It is called Witness to Gettysburg, and was written by Richard Wheeler. My version was the 1987 edition, but a new edition was published in 2021.

Why was it so good? To understand this we need to look at the nature of the material historians use to construct their work. Some of this source material is more important than others. In the case of Wheeler’s book, he used the best material in the most vivid way possible, and put aside other materials that could have distracted from the story.

In writing my own histories of space exploration in the 20th century, I quickly learned there were two types of sources I needed to depend on. First there are what historians call original or primary sources. These are the testimonies of the actual participants, the individuals who actually did the deed and thus knew better than anyone what really happened. In the case of space, astronauts, their families, and the engineers and managers of NASA at the time made up this group.

Primary sources can also include others who were not actually participants but lived at the time and witnessed the events as they occurred. For example, news articles written by reporters as events unfolded fall into this group. So can the historian himself, if he or she was alive during those events. In the case of my own books, that made me this kind of primary source. I was alive when the space age began, and saw it unfold in real time, with my own eyes.

Any history that does not rely on these original sources, or gives them short shrift, should not be taken seriously.

Next come secondary sources, books and academic articles written after the fact by historians, economists, sociologists, or researchers from any number of academic fields. Such works are of great value for any historian, as they can give you a wider context and alternative interpretations of the long term consequences of what happened. They can also be invaluable for tracking down more original sources.

There is however a danger if you rely too much on these secondary sources. Often academics begin treating their analysis of events as more important than that of the primary sources, even though they weren’t there and only know of the events secondhand. When I got my masters degree in early colonial history in the 1990s I discovered this tendency to be a very big problem in academia. My history teachers wanted me to learn early colonial history from what past historians thought about it. I wanted to learn that history from the people who lived it. My teachers didn’t like that, and constantly challenged my conclusions because I was contradicting those other historians. I countered that I had read the original sources, and discovered those other historians were simply wrong.

In the end, I found I actually knew more about that history than my teachers, as they were seeped in arguing the analysis of their compatriots rather than studying the real data.

Now, back to Wheeler’s book, which focuses entirely on the battle of Gettysburg, from the moment Robert E. Lee began his invasion north to the end of the battle when he was retreating in defeat.

What made this book so good is Wheeler’s approach. To quote him in his introduction:

Witness to Gettysburg attempts something new: a telling of the story, in terms both historical and human, as largely as possible in the words of the participants, both military and civilian, both male and female.

In other words, Wheeler let the people who fought or witnessed the battle to tell the story. As much as possible, he relied on primary sources, while he stayed in the background and only inserted himself in order to clarify the context of each quote, or provide detailed maps to make the topography of the battle more easily understood.

Red indicate Confederate forces, blue the Union

The result is a vivid and very powerful and clear recreation of the battle. Wheeler is aided by the fact that Americans in the mid-1800s were not only very literate, they wrote a lot of letters and memoirs describing these events. In a sense, their writings were the equivalent of our smart phones today. Rather than lifting their camera to record what happened so that others would have multiple videos of the event, they each sat down and wrote their perspective, almost always immediately afterward. The result is that we can see Gettysburg as it unfolded from many points of view, of Union and Confederate soldiers as well as the civilians caught up in these events.

In reading a history of this kind you also get a more personal sense of the time and place. For example, the civilized behavior of both warring sides to civilians and their opponents is quite startling. Lee’s invading army treated the Pennsylvanian civilians it surrounded with diffidence and respect, even allowing them to express openly their opposition to the rebellion. Civilians were not combatants, and were to be treated kindly. And while both armies were unwavering in their desire to win by killing as many soldiers as possible, both treated the wounded and their captured prisoners decently. The wounded for example were all helped by both sides, no matter which army they came from.

In the end however Wheeler’s book makes it clear who the good guys were in this war. Before Lee’s arrival in Gettysburg the town had a small population of free black citizens, treated decently and as equals by the white population. When the Confederates arrived those blacks were rounded up to be taken back to the south as slaves. It didn’t matter they were free Americans. They were black, and the southerns automatically considered them inferior and destined to be slaves forever.

And we learn this from their own words.

It is also clear in reading Witness to Gettysburg how badly General Lee managed the battle. His choices during the engagement were routinely bad. His subordinate General James Longstreet kept trying to tell him his head-on-attack tactic was a mistake, that a flanking move would be more effective, but Lee would not listen. In the end Lee destroyed his army with no gain, and had to flee back to Virginia in defeat.

Once again, it is essential if you want to understand the past to read the perspective the people who lived it. Sadly our modern universities no longer demand this, and so we now have several generations of college-educated students who really only know the past through the cartoon ideologies of their teachers and the academics these teachers admire.

Wheeler’s book is a great way to counter that shallow education, and to get that more humane perspective of our country’s past.