News---Collector Sends Library of Congress Nearly 700 Images

Faces 0f the Civil War, Staring Out Across The Decades, Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post, October 3, 2010.

A Virginia collector has donated to the Library of Congress the largest trove of Civil War-era photographs depicting average soldiers that the institution has received in at least 50 years, officials said last week. The stunning photographs - small, elegant ambrotypes and tintypes - show hundreds of the young men who fought and died in the war, often portrayed in the innocence and idealism before the experience of battle.

The pictures, almost 700 in all, make up the bulk of the collection of Tom Liljenquist, 58, of McLean, who operates a chain of Washington area jewelry stores and with his sons has been buying Civil War photographs for 15 years. The images show the striking youth of the soldiers of the 1860s. Many seem barely out of boyhood and too young for the trials ahead of them. Yet, as Liljenquist remarked last week, they became saviors of the nation. The donation comes on the eve of the war's sesquicentennial next year, and the library plans a major exhibition of the photos in April, on the 150th anniversary of start of the war.

But most of the images have been digitized and are available online. "This is an amazing gift of Civil War material," said Carol M. Johnson, curator of photography in the library's prints and photographs division. "A landmark gift." Liljenquist, whose name is pronounced "Lily-en-quist," said his family donated the images to make them available to posterity, free of restrictions. And when "they digitize the photos," he said, "that photograph will look exactly that way 20,000 years from now."

Most of the pictures are of Union soldiers. But there are also several dozen Confederates. There are no generals or politicians, and most of the Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs portrayed are unidentified. There are also rare photos of African American soldiers, as well as women and children. One moving photograph shows a young boy wearing a checkered shirt and sitting in a wooden chair, his thumb hooked in the pocket of a jacket that has rows of bright buttons. He's a fair-skinned child, and there was a lock of blond hair tucked behind the keepsake, dated from the 1850s. Also hidden behind the photo was a folded note, with a haunting message from the past.

"My beloved son Carl," it read. "Taken from me on April 1, 1865 at age 18." He'd been killed in the fighting at Dinwiddie Courthouse, days before the Civil War ended, the writer said: "Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

The identity of the boy is not known. Nor is that of his bereaved parent, although he or she knew Shakespeare, as the closing quote is from "Hamlet." But such anonymity confers a certain mystery and allows the viewer to imagine each subject's life, Liljenquist said at the library last week. A picture of a sad-eyed little girl wearing mourning ribbons on her dress as she holds a photo of her dead soldier father in her lap seems a saga. She is wearing a necklace and sits with clasped hands as she stares wearily into the camera over the distance of a century and a half.

The striking ambrotype of the African American Union soldier posing with his wife and two daughters cost Liljenquist $19,200, but it reminded his sons of a family now in the White House. Did that soldier, they wondered, ever fathom such an event? "I think it's one of the most important photographs taken during the American Civil War," the collector said. "It's the only one that we know of of a black soldier and his family."

There are numerous photos of soldiers who look like boys - in hats too large, collars too big. There is confidence, determination and beauty in their faces. They don't seem to be faces yet etched by the sights of Fredericksburg, Gettysburg or Spotsylvania. One serene young Union soldier with the visage of a teenager holds his musket with the large hands of a man. His name is not known. Did he live, marry, have children and grandchildren? What parents, wife, descendants perhaps gazed at his likeness, with pride or heartbreak?

The fresh-faced Cpl. Alvin B. Williams, of the 11th New Hampshire regiment, is pictured standing with his musket, in full uniform with his cap brim turned up - the picture of a jaunty Union infantryman. Eighteen when he enlisted in 1862, he was killed at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864. Another Union soldier, Freeman Mason, of the 17th Vermont regiment, was photographed holding a picture showing his brother, Michael, who was killed at the Battle of Savage's Station in 1862. Freeman Mason, himself, died in 1865.

One photograph shows a young Union soldier sitting beside a woman, who might be his wife or sister. Their names are not known. But the soldier's hat indicates that he was with the battle-hardened 86th New York infantry regiment, which lost scores of men at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Spotsylvania. Another shot identifies its youthful subject as Confederate Pvt. W.T. Harbison, of the 11th North Carolina regiment. He has light-colored eyes and short hair, and he looks like a high school senior. His regiment is said to have lost half its 600 men at Gettysburg. Liljenquist said he became fascinated with the photographs after he bought one in a shop in Ellicott City. "I was just impressed by the sincerity of the soldier's look," he said. "I felt like I had really picked up a piece of history . . . I felt a real kinship."

Liljenquist, who was reared in Northern Virginia and is the president of Liljenquist & Beckstead Jewelers, said he grew up steeped in the region's Civil War history. He, and later his sons, Jason, 19, Brandon, 17, and Christian, 13, assembled the collection methodically, he said. They went to memorabilia shows as far away as Tennessee, networked with dealers, and made purchases on eBay. Some pictures cost a hundred dollars; others thousands. They wanted images that resonated with them, pictures that for one reason or another made them say, "Wow," he said. "We looked for compelling faces that seemed to be saying something across time to us."

The photos, many which fit in the palm of a hand, are on glass - an ambrotype; or metal - a tintype. Most were probably taken by local photographers before a soldier was sent to the front or by itinerant photographers who set up a mobile studio at a regimental encampment, said Johnson, the library curator. In the past 50 years, the library, which has many photos of famous Civil War figures, had acquired only about three dozen photographs of average soldiers, she said. "This fills that gap completely," she said.

Text Source with photo captions:
Washington Post, October 3 2010

News--- Brady's Collection from National Archives Now At Flickr

Mathew Brady (1823-1896) was one of the most prolific photographers of the nineteenth century, creating a visual documentation of the Civil War period (1860-1865). During the Civil War, Brady and his associates traveled throughout the eastern part of the country, capturing the effects of the War through photographs of people, towns, and battlefields. Additionally, Brady kept studios in Washington, DC and New York City, where many influential politicians and war heroes sat for portraits.

The U.S. National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images from the series Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes (National Archives's Local Identifier 111-B) and included them in our online catalog. We plan to upload all of the ones available in the online catalog to Flickr gradually over a few months.

To better aid researchers, we have created topical sets on Flickr that organize the photos in a meaningful way. These sets are constantly added to as more photos are available on Flickr. Sixty-two sets contain photos of common and uncommon Civil War locations, individuals, structures such as: entrenchments, defenses, forts, breastworks, earthworks, gabions, abatis, cities, battlefields, casualities of war and many others.

Text and Image Source: Link to Image Source and Brady Collection

News--- Photograph of Enslaved Children? Historic Sleuthing

Portrait or Postcard? The Controversy over a “Rare” Photograph of Slave Children, Mary Niall Mitchell, History News Network, June 21, 2010.

For those of us who work with historical photographs (particularly images from the nineteenth century, when the medium was still in its infancy) there are few things more thrilling than stumbling on an image we didn’t know existed. But finding and then identifying historical photographs with any certainty, particularly the subjects in them, is tricky business. Retrieving the story behind the image—who took it, of whom, and why—can often be near impossible.

So I was surprised last week to see an AP story about a “rare” photograph of slave children. The accompanying image—purportedly of two boys, either enslaved or just recently freed, from North Carolina taken in the 1860s dressed in ragged clothes, seated on a wooden barrel, posed for the camera—intrigued me for several reasons. For one, my own reading of the image was quite different from what was described in the wire article and subsequent reports (recent sleuthing by collectors supports my suspicions, as I’ll explain).

Second, the eagerness to accept the authenticity of this image as a reflection of daily life in the South in this era is based on, at best, a shallow reading of the history of black children in the photography of this period. Finally, the shock the image of “slave children” seemed to give reporters and readers, and even some experts, makes it clear that the picture of antebellum slavery most people hold in their heads is an outdated one. If they imagine Southern plantations were sustained largely by the sweat and blood by enslaved adults, the work of recent historians has brought another view to light, one in which young people made up the majority of the enslaved.

The basic story about the discovery and subsequent dispute over the photograph’s provenance, is as follows. A collector named Keya Morgan recently purchased the album containing the photograph, found in an attic in North Carolina, for $30,000. He also purchased, at the same sale, for $20,000, a deed of sale for a slave named John, valued at $1,150 in 1854. The deed seems to have been represented to Morgan as the sale document for one of the boys in the photograph, but this link seems unlikely. The price is awfully high for an infant in that period, which is what either boy in the photograph would have been at the time of sale if the picture had been taken in the 1860s. Subsequent digging by the AP and others found what seems to be the original petition for the sale in the Digital Archive of Slavery, which suggests that the slave John, mentioned in the deed, was twenty-seven or twenty-eight in 1854.

Bringing further attention to the photograph was the initial attribution of the image to someone in Matthew Brady’s photographic studio (the caption beneath Morgan’s photograph reads simply “Brady”). If a link to the famous Civil War photographer could be confirmed, perhaps it could justify the high sale price. Web searches by a blogger named Kate Marcus and a collector named Sherry Howard, however, found other copies of this image in stereoscope format (meant to be seen through a 3-D like viewfinder popular from the mid- to late nineteenth century). One copy recently sold on eBay for $163, and another is in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Both are attributed to J.N. Wilson, a photographer active in Savannah, Georgia in the 1870s and 1880s, and seem to have been part of a series of “Plantation Scenes.” The caption in the NYPL catalog (which presumably appears on card’s verso) reads: “Plantation Scene; Happy Little Nigs.”

Complete Text of article: Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans. Her latest book, Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (NYU, 2008), is now available in paperback.

Top Image Source: University of New Orleans
Bottom Image Source: New York University Press

News---Photograph of Slave Children Launches History Sleuths

Rare Photo Of Slave Children Found In NC Attic, Nicole Norfleet, Associated Press, June 10, 2010.

A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy. Art historians believe it's an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated.

The photo, which may have been taken in the early 1860s, was a testament to a dark part of American history, said Will Stapp, a photographic historian and founding curator of the National Portrait Gallery's photographs department at the Smithsonian Institution. "It's a very difficult and poignant piece of American history," he said. "What you are looking at when you look at this photo are two boys who were victims of that history."

In April, the photo was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of John for $1,150, not a small sum in 1854. New York collector Keya Morgan said he paid $30,000 for the photo album including the photo of the young boys and several family pictures and $20,000 for the sale document. Morgan said the deceased owner of the home where the photo was found was thought to be a descendant of John.

A portrait of slave children is rare, Morgan said. "I buy stuff all the time, but this shocked me," he said. What makes the picture an even more compelling find is that several art experts said it was created by the photography studio of Mathew Brady, a famous 19th-century photographer known for his portraits of historical figures such as President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Stapp said the photo was probably not taken by Brady himself but by Timothy O'Sullivan, one of Brady's apprentices. O'Sullivan took a multitude of photos depicting the carnage of the Civil War. In 1862, O'Sullivan famously photographed a group of some of the first slaves liberated after Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Such photos were circulated in the North by abolitionists to garner support for the Union during the Civil War, said Harold Holzer, an author of several books about Lincoln. Holzer works as an administrator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of the photos depicted adult slaves who had been beaten or whipped, he said. The photo of the two boys is more subtle, Holzer said, which may be why it wasn't widely circulated and remained unpublished for so long. "To me, it's such a moving and astonishing picture," he said.

Ron Soodalter, an author and member of the board of directors at the Abraham Lincoln Institute in Washington, D.C., said the photo depicts the reality of slavery. "I think this picture shows that the institution of slavery didn't pick or choose," said Soodalter, who has written several books on historic and modern slavery. "This was a generic horror. It victimized the old, the young."

For now, Morgan said, he is keeping the photo in his personal collection, but he said he has had an inquiry to sell the photo to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He said he is considering participating in the creation of a video documentary about John. "This kid was abused and mistreated and people forgot about him," Morgan said. "He doesn't even exist in history. And to know that there were a million children who were like him. I've never seen another photo like that that speaks so much for children."

CWL: Looks like a Reconstruction Era photograph to me.
Text and Image Source: Google News

Channeling Earth: Rivers Seen From Space

Check out this beautiful gallery of pictures (including hi-res images) of rivers from all over the world, imaged by satellites and photographed by astronauts.

"Rivers connect Earth’s mountains and lakes to its oceans, creating lifelines that provide water, food, transportation and recreation along the way. Some rivers, like the Nile, bring life to barren landscapes that would otherwise be uninhabitable. Others, like the Mississippi, defy our best efforts to tame them."

Channeling Earth: Rivers Seen From Space | Wired Science | Wired.com

News---Recently Discovered Photograph: Lincoln?

Collector: Lincoln Photo Uncovered In Grant Album, Brett Zongker, Associated Press, March 10, 2009.

A collector believes a photograph from a private album of Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant shows President Abraham Lincoln in front of the White House and could be the last image taken of him before he was assassinated in 1865. If it is indeed Lincoln, it would be the only known photo of the 16th president in front of the executive mansion and a rare find, as only about 130 photos of him are known to exist. A copy of the image was provided to The Associated Press.

Grant's 38-year-old great-great-grandson, Ulysses S. Grant VI, had seen the picture before, but didn't examine it closely until late January. A tall figure in the distance caught his eye, although the man's facial features are obscured. He called Keya Morgan, a New York-based photography collector and Lincoln aficionado, who helped identify it as Lincoln. "I was like, 'I don't know who this is, Keya,'" said Grant, a Springfield, Mo., construction business owner.

Although authenticating the 2 1/2-by-3 1/2-inch photo beyond a shadow of a doubt could be difficult, several historians who looked at it said the evidence supporting Morgan's claim is compelling and believable. Morgan talked Grant into taking the photo out of the album and examining it for clues, such as the identity of the photographer. "Not knowing who the photographer is is like not knowing who your mother or father is," Morgan told Grant.

Grant carefully removed it and was shocked to see the handwritten inscription on the back: "Lincoln in front of the White House." Grant believes his great-grandfather, Jesse Grant, the general's youngest son, wrote the inscription. Also included was the date 1865, the seal of photographer Henry F. Warren, and a government tax stamp that was issued for such photos to help the Civil War effort between 1864 and 1866.

Morgan recalled the well-documented story of Warren's trip to Washington to photograph Lincoln after his second inauguration in March 1865. Lincoln was killed in April, so the photo could be the last one taken of him. Warren, a commercial photographer from Massachusetts, enticed Lincoln into his frame shortly after the inauguration by taking pictures of young Tad Lincoln and asking the boy to bring his father along for a pose, according to the book, "Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose," by Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf. "This is the first act of paparazzi ever toward a president," Morgan said. "Lincoln is not too happy at all."

Historians say it has been decades since a newfound Lincoln image was fully authenticated. And in the Grant photo, it's not obvious to the naked eye who is standing in front of the executive mansion. You can see the White House, a short gate that once lined the building, and, on the lawn, a Thomas Jefferson statue that was later replaced with a fountain. Five people can be seen standing in front of the building. The tall man's face is obscured, but zooming in on the image with a computer reveals a telling beard. "Once you scan it and blow it up, you can see the whole scenario — there's a giant standing near the White House," Morgan said. At 6-foot-4, Lincoln was the tallest U.S. president.

Morgan, who has sold photographs of Lincoln and other historical figures to the Smithsonian Institution, the White House and others, said he purchased the image from Grant for $50,000 in February. It will be added to Morgan's $25 million collection of Lincoln artifacts and original images. Several historians say Morgan has a good case. Will Stapp, who was the founding curator of the National Portrait Gallery's photographs department and who now appraises fine art and photographs, said he's usually cynical about such claims. But he said he was "very satisfied that it's Lincoln" in the picture.

"It looks to me like Lincoln's physique," he said. "I can see his hairline. I can see the shadow of his beard." White House curator William Allman said the photo appears to include Lincoln. "I guess there's always an element of doubt," he said. "It feels pretty likely, though." Even if it's not Lincoln, it would be among the oldest photographs of the White House.

Lincoln artifacts have recently been hot commodities leading up to the 200th anniversary of his birth, and President Barack Obama has evoked his memory several times for his work to unify the nation. The significance of the photo is difficult to judge, Stapp said. It does show the relative freedom Lincoln had compared with presidents today, and offers a unique view of the White House from the 1860s, he said. "We don't so much think of (Lincoln) as living at the White House," Stapp said. "In that respect, I think it's an important find."

Text Source: Associated Press, March 10 2009

Image Source: AP Photo/Collection of Keya Morgan, LincolnImages.com)

New---Images Of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History

Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History, Gordon Dammann and Alfred Jay Bollett, Demos Medical Publishing, 201 pp., index, endnotes, illustrated, $34.95.

Gordon Dammann, author of the Pictorial Encyclopedia of Civil War Medical Instruments and Equipment (1998)and Alfred Jay Bollet, author of Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (2002) have compiled an essential guide to the development of medical photography, medical education, nursing, ambulances, hospitals, wounds and diseases during the American Civil War. Heavily illustrated with period photographs and narrated with an accessible style, this slim but thorough book contains the anecdotes and the statistics that are necessary to attractively tell the story of Civil War medicine. Cartes de visite, that is calling cards with the bearer's photograph, of Union and Confederate surgeons are offered in their own chapter. My favorite is Surgeon james B. Armbleton of the 35th Georgia. Wearing a winter coat with a shawl collar that appears to be trellis-stripped and a size too large, Armbleton has the appearance of an adventurous scholar. His short-crowned hat today would be associated with an ante-bellum riverboat professional gambler. Those readers who subscribe to Civil War Historian that focuses on the era's material culture will appreciate Dammann's and Bollet's work.

Nearly half of Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History features the hospitals, wounds and diseases of the conflict. Gleaning significant details from The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Union surgeons Silas Weir Mitchell's and Jonathan Letterman's post-war writings, Dammann and Bollet, review the work in hospitals, both Union and Confederate, East and West. I suspect no other publication has more photographs of Civil War hospitals than Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History.

This volume is likely to be appreciated by both the general reader and the one who has read deeply in the topic. Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History, suitable for public, school and academic libraries.

Forthcoming: Another Gem from Timothy Isbell

Shiloh and Corinth: Sentinels of Stone, Timothy T. Isbell, 176 pages, University Press of Mississippi, $40.00. (November 2007)

Shiloh and Corinth: Sentinels of Stone examines the memorials to the brave deeds performed by soldiers of the North and South. Over ninety striking photographs and accompanying histories reveal the beauty of the Tennessee and Mississippi battlefields of Shiloh, Savannah, Iuka and Corinth. The narrative describes the deaths of Albert Sidney Johnston and W. H. L. Wallace, the first victories of Ulysses S. Grant's military career, the failures of Earl Van Dorn, the torments of William Rosecrans and Sterling Price. Shiloh and Corinth: Sentinels of Stone guides the reader through the landscapes where U.S. Grant began to understand that the Civil War would be long and would be bloody.

Timothy T. Isbell of Gulfport, Mississippi, is a photojournalist with the Sun Herald newspaper in Biloxi. He is a former photojournalist-in-residence at the University of Southern Mississippi and a Knight Foundation/National Endowment of the Arts recipient for his photographic study of the Vietnamese people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

This book is the third in a series; his other works are on Vicksburg and Gettysburg. This series is one that is always on the top of CWL's stack of frequently handled books. At anytime of the day, the reader can pick up one of Isbell's books and spend five minutes in awe of the battlefield memorials and their messages.

New This Summer: Photographs of Gettysburg, 1863-1938

Historic Photos of Gettysburg, John S. Salmon, Turner Publishing Company, 206 pages, hardcover, $39.95.

Scott Mingus offers this post on the Military History Online military media room. I concur. His review follows these CWL remarks.
Civil War Librarian:

The most intriging photograph is the Taney Farmstead on the east bank of Rock Creek. The house and barn was a sharpshooters' post and the 2nd Virginia of the Stonewall Brigade unmercifully harrassed the 13th New Jersey of Colgrove's Brigade. Currently, the house are ruins which are hidden by trees and undergrowth. In addition, the photograph showing the kitchen at Camp Letterman Hospital during the autumn without leaves on the trees is remarkable in its content. Fully 75% of the book contains photos from late 1863 until the dedication of the Peace Light Memorial in 1938. The photographs of the 50th (1913) and 75th (1938) reunions are outstanding. The book is worth every penny.

Scott Mingus:

Veteran writer/author John S. Salmon has assembled an excellent collection of some of the most famous photographs of the historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania battlefield and town, most taken with a couple of decades after the July 1863 battle. Included are some of the very best photographs, including some of the studies of dead soldiers, pictures of the key buildings and locations, early battlefield monumentation, and the various reunions of the veterans. The book is a very useful addition to the Civil War library and would make a fine “coffee table book” for display and browsing. The photo collection is varied and insightful, and the breadth of the pictures selected allows the reader to get a good feel for early photography at the battlefield and environs.

The author includes brief captions for the photos, and that is where I have some minor issues with the book. Hopefully in a second edition, some glaring errors in these captions will be corrected. For example, Zacharia Taney should be Zephaniah according to most local accounts (page 25); a barn on page 84 is portrayed as the Nicholas Codori farm (recent research has shown that this photo is actually a different barn, one that was behind the Dobbin House closer to town), and on page 74, the author incorrectly states that a grave belongs to W. Williams, Company B, 24th Michigan Cavalry should be the 24th Michigan Infantry. There are a few other nagging little nits as well in other captions.

That being said, the photos are the prize of the book. It is easily on the of the best anthologies of Gettysburg photographs in terms of overall scope. The poorly researched captions are not enough of a distraction to prevent me from recommending this book, especially if corrected in a second edition.

Forthcoming: Images of Medicine

Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History, Gordon E. Damman and Alfred J. Bollet, 192 pp., Demos Publishing, $35.00, Fall 2007.

Dr. Alfred Bollet’s Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs won wide acclaim as an expert study. Now, in collaboration with Dr. Gordon Dammann, Dr. Bollet has taken his expertise one step further and pictorially illuminated this fascinating chapter in medical history. Featuring 250 rare archival photographs, Images of Civil War Medicine is a comprehensive visual encyclopedia of medical care during a seminal event in American history. The book showcases the uniforms, equipment, and members of a large group of individual Civil War doctors — “Cartes de Visites” — along with resonant images of existing pre-war structures used to heal the sick. Also here are prominent medical educators, hospitals, stewards, and ambulances,as well as images of surgery, dentistry, nursing, and embalming. Ideal for Civil War buffs, historians, and medical history enthusiasts, Images of Civil War Medicine gives a complete overview of this era's medical realities. Text From Publisher.

Forthcoming: Stunning Photographs, Crisp Text

In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee: The Wilderness Through Cold Harbor,Gordon C. Rhea (Author), Chris E. Heisey (Photographer), Louisiana State University Press,hardcover, 144 pages, 24 Halftones, 61 Color Illustrations, 15 Maps, September 2007

In early May 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant initiated a drive through central Virginia to crush Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. For forty days, the armies fought a grinding campaign from the Rapidan River to the James River that helped decide the course of the Civil War. Several of the war's bloodiest engagements occurred in this brief period: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna River, Totopotomoy Creek, Bethesda Church, and Cold Harbor. Pitting Grant and Lee against one another for the first time in the war, the Overland Campaign, as this series of battles and maneuvers came to be called, represents military history at its most intense. In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee, a unique blend of narrative and photographic journalism from Gordon C. Rhea, the foremost authority on the Overland Campaign, and Chris E. Heisey, a leading photographer of Civil War battlefields, provides a stunning, stirring account of this deadly game of wits and will between the Civil War's foremost military commanders.

Here Grant fought and maneuvered to flank Lee out of his heavily fortified earthworks. And here Lee demonstrated his genius as a defensive commander, countering Grant's every move. Adding to the melee were cavalry brawls among the likes of Philip H. Sheridan, George A. Custer, James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart, and Wade Hampton. Forty days of combat produced horrific casualties, some 55,000 on the Union side and 35,000 on the Confederate. By the time Grant crossed the James and began the Siege of Petersburg, marking an end to this maneuver, both armies had sustained significant losses that dramatically reduced their numbers.

Rhea provides a rich, fast-paced narrative, movingly illustrated by more than sixty powerful color images from Heisey, who captures the many moods of these hallowed battlegrounds as they appear today. Heisey made scores of visits to the areas where Grant and Lee clashed, giving special attention to lesser-known sites on byways and private property. He captures some of central Virginia's most stunning landscapes, reminding us that though battlefields conjure visions of violence, death, and sorrow, they can also be places of beauty and contemplation. Accompanying the modern pictures are more than twenty contemporary photographs taken during the campaign or shortly afterwards, some of them never before published.

At once an engaging military history and a vivid pictorial journey, In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee offers a fresh vision of some of the country's most significant historic sites.

The Authors
Gordon C. Rhea is the author of four books on the Overland Campaign: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864; The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7-12, 1864; To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee, May 13-25, 1864; and Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864. He is currently writing the fifth and concluding volume in the series. A frequent lecturer on military history and a practicing attorney, he lives in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, with his wife and two sons.

Chris E. Heisey is coauthor of Gettysburg: This Hallowed Ground. He is a photojournalist for the Roman Catholic Diocese in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and lives in Mechanicsburg with his wife and son. [text supplied by publisher]

CWL --- What the Soldiers Really Saw At Gettysburg

Farms At Gettysburg, The Fields of Battle: Selected Images From the Adams County Historical Society, Timothy H. Smith, Thomas Publications, 2007, paperback $9.95

With this book, Timothy Smith continues sharing his successful search for photographs of the Gettysburg battlefield. These nearly 100 black and white photographs, with their extensive captions, reveal what the soldiers of 1863 saw and what they returned to during their post-war reunions. 'Farms At Gettysburg' is essential for anyone reading a general history of the battle or anyone preparing for the licensed battlefield guide exam. With this book, a visitor to the battlefield may be able stand in a particular spot and successfully imagine the soldiers view. The well written text is accessible to readers age 12 and above.

Off Topic, Novel: Mercury Visions and the Human Heart

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre: A Novel, Dominic Smith, 320 pages,
Atria/Washington Square Press, 2006/2007, hardcover/paperback, $24.00/$14.00

This novel peers into the mind and heart of the mid-19th-century French genius who invented the daguerreotype and into the mind and heart of a woman who refuses to be loved. In this story, the celebrated photographer Louis Daguerre suffers from the effects of the mercury process that creates the first photographs. He imagines of the end of the world, and launches on a quest to record a series of 10 images before the apocalypse.

Using an extended flashback, the author describes the intellectual progress, persistent experimentation and the physical hazards that Daguerre must surmount in order to achieve the breakthrough discovery before his competitors do. Smith renders an engaging portrait of Daguerre and his thinking, within a backstory of tumultuous times of political and social revolution.

Near the end of his career and fame, Daguerre enlists the help of bohemian poet Charles Baudelaire to help him find the settings of the portfolio, and together they prowl the underside of Paris in search of several of Daguerre's subjects and settings, including a beautiful naked woman, the perfect Parisian boulevard, and Daguerre's childhood friend and long-lost love, Isobel Le Fournier. As young adults, he held deep affections for her but she refused to be loved by him.

While visiting a Parisian brothel with Baudelaire, Daguerre encounters Isobel's daughter Chloe, who becomes the beautiful naked model in the photographer's portfolio. In addition, Smith details elements of two women's lives. The daughter rejects the mother because of the mother's rejection of romantic love; the mother rejects the unconditional love of a suitor because she does not believe that love is real.

Daguerre does achieve his portofolio before his own personal apocaplyse arrives, brought about by the mercury vapors of the photographic process. Besides being a rewarding experience, for the sake of the history of photography, the novel is also teaches, for this reader, something new about the human heart.