Book Review: Little Round Top at Gettysburg: A Reassessment of July 2, 1863

Little Round Top at Gettysburg: A Reassessment of July 2, 1863. By Joseph Michael Boslet. El Dorado Hills: Savas Beatie, 2026. Hardcover, 247 pp. $34.95.

Reviewed by Pete Miele

Little Round Top looms large in both the topography and annals of Gettysburg. Now, Joseph Michael Boslet has added to our understanding of military actions that occurred on that rise in the summer of 1863. His new book, Little Round Top at Gettysburg is subtitled: A Reassessment of July 2, 1863. Inside, he is successful in achieving just that: a thorough reinvestigation of the primary and secondary sources, coupled with a close analysis of the natural terrain from a military perspective. As many readers of this review no doubt know, Gettysburg National Military Park just completed a multi-year rehabilitation of the eminence, so it is only appropriate that we have a new work of scholarship to go with it.

The book is part history, part historiography. The author devotes considerable page space to untangling the different interpretations and primary source accounts of the fight on Little Round Top. As Boslet observes in his introduction, “we have gone on with certain understandings that have been accepted, with little question, for a number of years.” Finding conflicting accounts of action on July 2, his methodology reflects the “re-mining [of] existing source material.” The result, he writes, is “not a paradigm shift, but a paradigm bump in the historiography.” (xiv)

Boslet takes an Army of the Potomac-centric perspective. He focuses more on the movements and actions of United States forces when discussing the events leading up to the fierce fighting. In that sense, his study can be viewed as a good companion piece to Allen Thompson’s recent In the Shadow of the Round Tops (2023), which focuses on Confederate preparations for July 2. Surprisingly, though, Boslet does not cite Thompson’s book, only the latter’s 2019 Gettysburg Magazine article on Confederate Round Top reconnoiter Samuel Johnson.

Boslet’s strength comes from bringing the perspective of a soldier to the fields of Gettysburg. This is natural, as the author is a Vietnam War combat veteran. Within his analysis of the historical record, he is able to provide readers with insight into the impact of certain factors on the individual fighter, based on his own experience. For example, in the early pages of the book, Boslet meditates on the impact of harsh weather and lack of water on soldiers’ bodies: “Personally, I am unable to downplay the significance of water. My experience in Vietnam attests to that fact when on field operations, the priorities were obvious, ammunition, water and food in that order.” (8) Even with this perspective, however, he leaves out the most recent work on Gettysburg weather, Jon Nese and Jeffery Harding’s The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign (2025), which analyzes the weather of the month-long campaign.

The author also devotes considerable space to social and cultural aspects of the army. Boslet discusses commanders’ background and interpersonal relations. In the first chapter, he untangles the relationship between Army of the Potomac commander George Meade and V Corps commander George Sykes. This is critical to understanding how each man approached his duties on July 2.

Boslet also examines the sociocultural makeup of some of the units fighting on Little Round Top. For example, as the 44th Alabama steps off Warfield Ridge toward Little Round Top, Boslet takes a two-paragraph detour to introduce readers to the regiment and also provide a profile of the regimental commander, Col. William Flake Perry. He follows with a similar profile of the neighboring 48th Alabama and its commander. These brief diversions add depth to the martial action that dominates the narrative.

This is not a first read for the new Gettysburg buff. It assumes that the reader has some background knowledge of the conflict and personalities. For example, in discussing III Corps Commander Daniel E. Sickles, Boslet refers to the “Philip Barton Key incident,” without telling readers what that means. (This, of course, is Sickles’s 1859 murder of his wife’s lover Philip Barton Key.)

Boslet also relies on descriptions of Little Round Top, rather than employing photographs of the site, when referencing landforms and troop placements. The author’s reading of the terrain nevertheless is critical to his reassessment. Even as a seasoned Gettysburg scholar, I found this hard to follow sometimes when reading the book in the comfort of my home study. This oversight, however, likely results from the fact that Little Round Top was closed to the public for most of the time Boslet was writing, inhibiting his ability to take photos and causing him to rely on the National Park Service for the images he did include in the book.

Ultimately, though, this is a solid retelling of the actions on Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. The book most strongly benefits from the author’s background in the armed forces and his detailed reading of the terrain and primary source material. I predict that it will be a while before we see another work of scholarship that has anything new to say about the fighting on that rise south of Gettysburg.

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Pete Miele is a public historian and museum administrator, currently serving as Senior Project Leader at Susquehanna National Heritage Area in Wrightsville, PA, and as an Adjunct Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania.