Talk:Battle of Gaines' Mill

reversion of December 12

I have reapplied the changes that were reverted on December 12. The edit summary "of course there is" is obviously inadequate to explain why a reversion has occurred. Let me explain the original edit here because the edit summary is insufficient:

• There is no reason to call a battle a "Tactical victory" unless there is a general consensus among historians that the term "victory" is not adequate, that it merely a technical victory at the tactical level, implying that it is less than a victory at the strategic or operational level. (Lee's action at Antietam was a tactical victory, for instance, although it was a technical Union victory because Lee left the battlefield first.) If that is truly the case -- and I do not believe it is the case for Gaines' Mill -- the Aftermath section should go into more detail about why the cited author thinks so. We almost never use these adjectives for Civil War battle boxes in Wikipedia for this sort of reason.
• The paragraph about Savage's Station and White Oak Swamp concerns future battles in the campaign, although it is not written in that manner, and thus is inappropriate for an article about an earlier battle in the campaign.
• The paragraph about Lee wanting to take the initiative was in thedsf wrong sequence for the timeline of the Background section.

Hal Jespersen (talk) 20:47, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Recent edits

I can't speak for your source, but D.H. Hill's official report of the Seven Days (http://www.civilwarhome.com/dhhillsevendayor.htm) says that Ripley's brigade did not participate in the battle. It claims that Ripley failed to keep pace with the rest of the division, however one must also take into account the fact that the brigade was badly chewed up at Mechanicsville where it had lost three of four regimental commanders. 208.101.136.246 (talk) 23:51, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Which flank?

With both armies having forces on both the north and south sides of the Chickahominy River, and with the Confederates to the west of Union forces and attempting to drive them eastward, wouldn't a Confederate attack on the Union forces on the north side of the Chickahominy River be considered to be an attack by the Confederate left against the Union RIGHT flank? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.30.62.198 (talk) 15:59, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

You are correct, thank you for noticing. By coincidence, you found this at the time I was preparing an update off-line to the article. I am only partially finished, but since my progress has been lagging, I decided to commit the changes I have written so far and then come back to it over the next couple of weeks. I intend to expand the coverage of the battle itself and provide some maps that are more detailed. So watch this space. ... Hal Jespersen (talk) 21:00, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Article title?

Recently, the article title was changed to "Gaines's Mill", allegedly to match spelling within the article. However, I think the reverse should have been changed (i.e. the spelling in the article was wrong). The spelling "Gaines' Mill" is the one used by both the National Park Service and the Civil War Trust, two major organizations who actually have worked to preserve land in the battle in question. I think there needs to be discussion to potentially changing it back to the prior one. Morgan Riley (talk) 23:28, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

I would have agreed that the correct name of the battle is "Battle of Gaines' Mill" when I started to post but after examining several books and taking a look at Google books, I think Hal is probably right based on common name policy. Taking a meta-look at the corpus of English language books with the Ngram viewer supports the new article name. I ran the old version, new version and one without the possessive altogether.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 03:20, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

That is an interesting tool. Thanks for pointing it out. I changed the article title because (1) most of the significant references for the article spell it that way, (2) The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, which is the premier style guide for scholarly writing in the United States, no longer recommends the alternative "s' " form, and (3) as the owner of hundreds of books about the Civil War, I know that the overwhelming trend of modern scholarly books (published by academic presses, in journals, etc.) is to spell it this way. I do not accept the notion that the federal government is an appropriate guide for punctuation because they have been on a campaign for the last hundred years to use apostrophes incorrectly, most likely for ease in creating roadsigns and circulating letters through the post office. That is why we have Stones River, Harpers Ferry, etc. In those two example cases, modern historians have signed on to the modifications and use them widely, so it is appropriate to use them in Wikipedia articles. But it is very rare to see "Gaines' Mill" in modern histories. I can understand why the Civil War Trust hones closely to the National Park Service, but an alternative example is John Salmon's "Official Virginia Civil War Battlefield Guide," which is usually in lockstep with the NPS/CWSAC classification, but spells it Gaines's Mill. Hal Jespersen (talk) 16:36, 20 June 2011 (UTC)