One thing that really frames my reading of Civil War history when I was younger was how much perspective and deference was paid to the Confederate side of the story. I grew up in Virginia so this was not necessarily excusable, but understandable and of course not shocking. It was not balanced remotely.
This history comes from Bruce Catton. These three books, this being the first, specifically tell the story of the formation, the command, and the battles of the “Army of the Potomac” the amalgamation of armies in and around Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and even the Shenandoah Valley. Primarily we know this as the army commanded by McClellan in the early parts of the war and then especially by Grant later on. In the middle we will get Meade and various others taking over the responsibilities. This first volume focuses primarily on the installation of McClellan, how he was perceived as a kind of wunderkind, and like with Ryan from the office, his eventual fall from grace. The book carries through the battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg in 1862 in western Maryland, which gives Lincoln enough cachet to release the Emancipation Proclamation, which as Catton mentions here, seemed to promise everything and nothing at the same time, but helped to establish some key legal, political, and moral ideas about the war.
Bruce Catton was eventually given the task of writing the important centennial history of the war in the 1960s, but this more tightly focused set of books, and also including his two histories of Grant, really shift my own history reading away from the kind of Confederate focus I am used to.