Preview: Powell, “Battle Above the Clouds”

If you’ve been reading Bull Runnings for a while, you know that I’ve previewed all of the titles in Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War series. And you also know how these books work. Concise histories, lots of maps and illustrations, tough paperbacks, suitable for the field. The really interesting parts, to me anyway, are the appendices. So, for this newest publication, I’m going to give you the bare minimum, and flesh out those appendices for you.

Battle Above the Clouds: Lifting the Siege of Chattanooga and the Battle of Lookout Mountain, October 16 – November 24, 1863, by David A. Powell

• Foreword by William Lee White
• Five page prelude
• Narrative 107 pages
• Six Hal Jespersen maps
• Ten page driving tour 1 – Wheeler’s Raid and the Chattanooga Campaign, seven stops
• Fourteen page driving tour 2 – Brown’s Ferry, Wauhatchie, and Lookout Mountain, nine stops
• Appendix A: The Myth of the Cracker Line – Frank Varney
• Appendix B: A Tale of Two Paintings – Powell
• Appendix C: Civil War Tourism: Lookout Mountain – Powell
• Orders of Battle
• No footnotes, bibliography, or index in this volume

David A. Powell is a VMI graduate and author of numerous works and articles on the Chickamauga Campaign, most recently Barren Victory.