The Almanac of American Military History provides a comprehensive chronology of events that are part of American military history. Although the author makes a brief reference to the Viking settlement of Newfoundland circa 1000 CE and to other historical elements of the development of warfare as needed, the work functionally covers the period 1492-2011 with specific geographical and political focus on what is now the United States. Each era is represented by a high-level overview narrative; a day-by-day timeline interspersed with supplementary material; a short selection of excerpts from primary source documents; summarizing statistics for the military events of the era; and a bibliography.

Each date or date range first refers to the overarching conflict and campaign, if appropriate, and then provides a short narrative interspersed with cross-references to other dates. For battles and other complex events, the narrative follows the action chronologically and indicates the disposition of the armies before and after battle. A familiarity with battle maps is helpful for interpreting the diagrams, but they are easy to read and fairly well annotated.

While the organization of the work by era is generally successful, this decision has a negative impact on the utility of the bibliography sections, which are alphabetized within the section rather than organized by subject. The statistical content suffers from a lack of documentation; in particular, statistics compiled through 2011 are not consistently labeled as such. The index by year is outmoded given the ease of determining the year and date of events using freely-available resources on the Internet, and content access would be improved by a more comprehensive topical index, particularly geographical indexing.

The value of the Almanac of American Military History is in its comprehensive day-by-day approach to presenting military action. Many military history almanacs found on library reference shelves present an encyclopedic level of content for only one conflict, while others present a substantially condensed view of military campaigns and battles, more in the fashion of a dictionary than an encyclopedia. Reference guides typically provide narrative entries for campaigns, major battles, and military leaders, but do not provide a relative sense of when events take place. Military history overviews are essential for understanding the broad forces that affect military actions, but lack consistent day-by-day information about the events that have taken place.

Rather than replacing reference guides and histories, the Almanac of American Military History is a useful supplemental resource for answering basic questions and starting research on American military history. It has particular value for users who are initially unfamiliar with research-level military history resources, and for users who want to learn more about the context in which military actions take place. This work also provides comprehensive coverage of the periods between wars, and as such would supplement a collection of conflict-specific military history almanacs.