Answer: First, consider what I note in your "How to Write a Book Review" page/assignment (See Blackboard "Course Documents") you were required to complete this, though not submit  it for a grade, before writing your first review). I'm assuming you  did, but it may help to revisit my comments here first: "A good review should consider: "Does the reviewer place this book within the larger historiography? In other words, does he mention other works of history that are on a related topic and discuss how the work he is reviewing is similar to them and contributes or fails to contribute to the historiography? If so, who are some of the authors mentioned who have written on this subject and to whom the reviewer compares this book? So for example, if you were to review a book like Stephen Sears's Landscape Turned Red, you may want to compare it to some of the other histories available on the Battle of Antietam, or at least refer your reader to these. Be careful claiming that a book is the best or one of the best in the related historiography if you don't know that."

Historiography is basically the history of the field of history. If you take a course on this, it usually begins with Herodotus, Thucydides, and continues through the present in trying to understand how historians interpreted the past from our earliest efforts to do this and how we continue to struggle with our job as collectors and interpreters of human history today. A good book reviewer attempts to understand how the book they've just read is grounded in what is already available while offering something new...and even more important, worthwhile...to the field. When a scholar writes a book, he/she must consider the available primary sources, i.e. be grounded in the material of the time. So for my book on Irish volunteers in the Union Army, for example, I looked at their letters home and diary entries while they were fighting, I looked at letters from their families and friends to see what they thought of the soldiers and the war as a whole, and this included family in the US and Ireland. I looked at newspapers based in Irish-American communities as well as what non-Irish-American papers are saying about Irish-Americans, and I looked at government/military records such as the volunteers' military and pension records, and that is just the beginning.

I have to also consider what's already been done by historians. Am I offering something new? Has someone already done this? Well, no, not really.  There are books on the Irish Brigade and there are books on some other Irish units. There are also books on "ethnic" soldiers, why they served, etc. But I was able to show that there is no sweeping history of why Irish and Irish-American men volunteered for the Union Army, what they thought of the northern war effort, how this evolved and how their service changed them and their families, and what their communities in America and Ireland thought of their service, how their views evolved, too.... See what I mean? When folks review my book, they'll be looking to make sure I considered not only books on the Irish-American experience in the American Civil War, but also books like McPherson's For Cause and Comrades, which offers a broad examination of Civil War service/combat motivation. I have to prove that I considered all of the relevant secondary literature, that I grounded my arguments in the primary sources evidence, and that my work is worth doing, i.e. that the field not only lacks this but that it needs it, too. Just lacking a history of a particular subject doesn't mean it's worth doing.

All of this is relevant historiography...what came before us, how did we interpret it, how can we better interpret new materials, and how  this has all evolved over the years. That's what historiography is all about.

Questions: How can I refer to other books on the same subject when this is the first time I've read about the Battle of Antietam or why soldiers fight, etc?