In "The Civil War in the Wester Theater, 1862," author Charles R. Bowery Jr. examines the campaigns and battles that occurred during 1862 in the vast region between the Appalachian Mountains in the east and the Mississippi River in the west, and from the Ohio River in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. Notable battles discussed include Mill Springs, Kentucky; Forts Henry and Donelson, Tennessee; Shiloh, Tennessee; Perryville, Kentucky; Corinth and Iuka, Mississippi; and Stones River, Tennessee.

Dr. J. Britt McCarley is a native of Atlanta, Georgia, and holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University. After working for the National Park Service, he came to the Army Historical Program in 1988 and is now the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) chief historian and the TRADOC Military History and Heritage Program director. He is the author of The Atlanta Campaign: A Civil War Driving Tour of Atlanta-Area Battlefields (1989) and The Great Question of the Campaign Was One of Supplies: A Reinterpretation of Sherman s Generalship During the 1864 March to Atlanta in Light of the Logistic Strategy, in Beyond Combat: Essays in Military History in Honor of Russell F. Weigley (2007), and a contributor to The Whirlwind War: The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (1995)."