Based on years of archival research, as well as personal experience as an embedded journalist with US forces in Iraq, Richard F. Miller has written a new kind of regimental history that focuses on the social and class identities of officers in a unit made up of equal parts Harvard-educated Boston brahmins and working class immigrants from Ireland and the German states. How these disparate groups united under the pressure of war and the leadership of their officers is the dramatic story Miller tells in Harvard's Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.