As we prepare to celebrate July Fourth, it often escapes us how close the day is to the Battle of Gettysburg.

“The Illustrated Gettysburg Reader: An Eyewitness History of the Civil War’s Greatest Battle” by Rod Gragg (Regenery History, $29.95, 485 pages) is an exhaustive account of the bloodiest days between the Union and Confederate armies.

Gragg, director of the Center for Military and Veterans Studies at Coastal Carolina University, is clearly well versed in the history. He relies on careful scholarship, and among the thousands of details packed in this tome are many about New Jerseyans.

For most, their names and deeds are long forgotten, but among those worth remembering is John C. Burns, from Burlington County, and who was nearly 70 when he was killed.

After describing Major General George Edward Pickett, who “was given to fancy uniforms and perfumed locks, which he wore shoulder-length in ringlets” Gregg describes how he finished last in his class at West Point. But he was an aggressive officer who rose quickly, and commanded his division in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge.

“Even as an enemy, a New Jersey private could not help but admit it was ‘grandest sight’ he had ever seen,” Gregg writes. “ ‘Their lines looking to be as straight as a line could be,’ he would recall, ‘their bayonets glistening in the sun, from right to left as far as the eye could see.”

The New Jersey soldier is not being dismissed with anonymity, another description comes from an unnamed Connecticut soldier, also fighting on Cemetery Ridge, where bodies were piling up.

“Among the front-line Federal regiments whose fire drove back Pettigrew’s hard-charging troops was the 12th New Jersey Infantry.”

Roughly 400 men delivered a “sheet of flame” Lieutenant Richard S. Thompson of the 12th New Jersey explained.

Granted, this week we are concentrating on another chapter of American history, but it is pretty easy for us to forget how very different life would be if on a field not all that far away the batte had turned out otherwise.