REVIEW: "The Civil War CD-ROM"
The Civil War CD-ROM: The War of the Rebellion. 1996 Guild Press of Indiana, 435 Gradle Dr., Carmel, IN 46032. $69.95.
This compact disc is a Civil War researcher/buff/reenactor's dream come true. If you have access to a computer with a CD-ROM drive, you now have point-and-click access to a mother lode of information heretofore only available in cumbersome books.
The price is a bargain. Not only do you get every word of the 127-volume set of the "Official Records of the War of the Rebellion" .. but this single CD also contains Dyer's three-volume "Compendium of the War of the Rebellion", Fox's 600-page "Regimental Losses in the American Civil War", and Alan & Barbara Aimone's "User's Guide to the Official Records of the American Civil War." All of this information is now at your fingertips for less than 75 bucks including shipping. Compare that to nearly $2,000 for a complete set of the OR's, $125 for Dyer's Compendium, and $60 for Fox's Regimental Losses -- in book form.
The Army Official Records are the definitive reference source for the original battle reports and correspondence of the War. Every word is indexed, allowing you to search the database with ease for any name or subject. For example, typing "(signer)F.M. Cockrell" will give you the location of every report and correspondence signed by the Missouri Brigade commander. A mouse click on each entry immediately sends you to that passage. This is so much easier than the cumbersome cross-referencing of the original volumes' indexing, it's not even funny.
Frederick Dyer's "Compendium" is a complete record of the battles, engagements, actions, and skirmishes, tabulated by States and showing the Union Troops engaged in each event. It also contains a concise history of each and every regiment & battery mustered into Federal service during the War.
William Fox's "Regimental Losses" is packed with statistics of Union regiments (and some Confederate), with detailed tables of casualties in their various engagements.
The "User's Guide" is an overview of the history and significance of the OR's, written by an historian at West Point. An exclusive feature of this cd-rom is a search engine that applies tens of thousands of hypertext jumps from the five-volume "Guide Index" to the actual referenced parts of the ORs. Throughout the text, footnotes pop up at the click of a mouse.
My only complaints about this cd-rom are
The typos are another matter. I found many of them in my random browsing of Missouri-related topics. Since I do not have immediate access to hardbound issues of the ORs, I couldn't compare whether the typos were in the orignal volumes. Some may have been. I doubt this many. Guild Press even acknowledges the problem by giving you an e-mail address to report them. This drawback won't seriously impact the casual student or reader .. but it's a major drawback for serious scholars and writers who might hope to utilize this easily accessible database.
Minimum requirements for "The Civil War CD-ROM" are a 386 IBM-compatible PC with a CD-ROM drive, 4MB of RAM and Windows 3.1. The publishers recommend a Pentium 100 processor, 4x CD-ROM, 16MB of RAM and Windows 95 for best results. I get along fine with a 486 with 12MB RAM and Windows 3.11.
Reviewed by Dennis Faught