Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War

by J. Matthew Gallman (Editor), Gary W. Gallagher (Editor), James Robertson Jr. (Contribution by), Thavolia Glymph (Contribution by), Daniel E. Sutherland (Contribution by)

Overview

Lens of War grew out of an invitation to leading historians of the Civil War to select and reflect upon a single photograph. Each could choose any image and interpret it in personal and scholarly terms. The result is a remarkable set of essays by twenty-seven scholars whose numerous volumes on the Civil War have explored military, cultural, political, African American, women’s, and environmental history.

The essays describe a wide array of photographs and present an eclectic approach to the assignment, organized by topic: Leaders, Soldiers, Civilians, Victims, and Places. Readers will rediscover familiar photographs and figures examined in unfamiliar ways, as well as discover little-known photographs that afford intriguing perspectives. All the images are reproduced with exquisite care. Readers fascinated by the Civil War will want this unique book on their shelves, and lovers of photography will value the images and the creative, evocative reflections offered in these essays.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820348100
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	04/15/2015
Series:	UnCivil Wars Series
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	852,251
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

J. MATTHEW GALLMAN is a professor of history at the University of Florida and author of Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, and the forthcoming Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front.

GARY W. GALLAGHER is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War emeritus at the University of Virginia. He has written or edited numerous books on the Civil War, including Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty and Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War, coedited with J. Matthew Gallman (both Georgia).

JAMES MARTEN is professor of history at Marquette University. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of several books, including America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (Georgia); Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America; Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front; and The Children’s Civil War.

CAROLINE E. JANNEY is John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and director of the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause; Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation; Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia; and Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox.

MEGAN KATE NELSON is a writer, historian, and cultural critic. Based in Lincoln, Massachusetts, she has written about Civil War and western history for a number of national publications. Nelson also writes a regular column on Civil War popular culture, “Stereoscope,” for Civil War Monitor, and her blog, Historista examines the “surprising and weird ways that people engage with history in everyday life.” Nelson is also the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia). She has taught at Texas Tech University; California State University, Fullerton; Harvard University; and Brown University.

SUSAN EVA O'DONOVAN is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Becoming Free in the Cotton South and coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, part of the ongoing scholarship of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. She is also codirector of the Memphis Massacre Project.

J. Matthew Gallman (Editor)
J. MATTHEW GALLMAN is a professor of history at the University of Florida and author of Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, and the forthcoming Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front.

Gary W. Gallagher (Editor)
GARY W. GALLAGHER is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War emeritus at the University of Virginia. He has written or edited numerous books on the Civil War, including Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty and Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War, coedited with J. Matthew Gallman (both Georgia).

Editorial Reviews

Lens of War is refreshingly episodic and individualized, with the best essays being deeply personal, Montaignean explorations of why the war still matters to individuals today.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Kenyon Gradert

Lens of War meets the promise of the simple observation that prompted its creation. Additionally, this book provides an excellent analysis of representative images. Perhaps most importantly however, these timeless photographs are the central focus of this volume—a rare event among academics.

Military Images magazine

This book changes the way we see the American Civil War. By looking intently at photographs - some familiar and some rarely seen - these expert interpreters reveal aspects of the war visible in no other way. The elegant essays, like the images they examine, are windows into fascinating lives.

Edward L. Ayers

This collection of images, many of them familiar to Civil War enthusiasts,were selected to serve as a jumping-off point for the essays of twenty-seven scholars on topics suggested by the photos. The photos, topics, and essays are an eclectic mix. By themselves, many of the photos would seem unremarkable, but the often brilliantly written essays compel the reader to view the photos with a fresh perspective. . . . Together, the photos and essays make a superb addition to Civil War collections.

Booklist

The UnCivil Wars series . . . describes itself as 'dedicated to new ways of seeing and telling the American Civil War.' Lens of War actually manages to tell the war by seeing it. Moreover, it illuminates not only how photographs shape our understandings and memories of the war, but also how we teach it, and how images—even in black and white—will always hold a special power the written world alone simply cannot supply. With all of this in mind, the book is highly recommended to historians of photography and visual culture (it even includes a very helpful resource on Civil War photographic histories), but for historians of the Civil War it is—without question—a must read.

Civil War Monitor - Matthew C. Hulbert

The pioneering cameramen of the Civil War wrought shocking images that stir and haunt us still. Lens of War is likewise groundbreaking, an album of essays that mines 1860s photographs for new insight into the war and its memory. Images I’ve stared at since boyhood—and others I’d never seen—come into fresh focus through the scholarly yet personal gaze of leading historians. This revelatory and highly readable book will captivate new and longtime students of the Civil War alike.

author of Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War - Tony Horwitz

While many of the well-chosen images will be recognizable to even the casual Civil War scholar, there are a few obscure images presented as well. It is also amazing to see how much information can be divulged from some seemingly simple images such as the dead horse of a general.

Blue & Gray Magazine - Tom Elmore

Lens of War isn’t intended for coffee tables. . . . It is not so much a collection of Civil War photographs as a book about the insight photography brings to our understanding of the war. . . . The photographs in Lens of War are doorways to lives long past; the words walk us through their worlds.

Allen Barra's Civil War Magazine

This fascinating volume . . . offers powerful insights into history and historians. . . . Lens of War is a sometimes moving and always enjoyable book to read.

The Journal of Southern History - Lawrence Kreiser Jr.

We view Alexander Gardner’s famous 1865 close-up portrait of Lincoln, Mathew Brady’s portrait of Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 after the Battle of Cold Harbor, Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveler, and Jeb Stuart in Confederate finery; in the accompanying essays we witness the rapture that these figures continue to cultivate in contemporary viewers. . . . Reading such entries, one is constantly reminded of the Roland Barthes’s claim that photographs can carry a punctum, the tiny, almost-incidental details within pictures that rivet the gaze and become deeply mesmerizing and achingly personal.

The Journal of American History - Anthony W. Lee

Lens of War isn’t intended for coffee tables. . . . It is not so much a collection of Civil War photographs as a book about the insight photography brings to our understanding of the war. . . . The photographs in Lens of War are doorways to lives long past; the words walk us through their worlds.

America's Civil War Magazine - Allen Barra

This collection of images, many of them familiar to Civil War enthusiasts,were selected to serve as a jumping-off point for the essays of twenty-seven scholars on topics suggested by the photos. The photos, topics, and essays are an eclectic mix. By themselves, many of the photos would seem unremarkable, but the often brilliantly written essays compel the reader to view the photos with a fresh perspective. . . . Together, the photos and essays make a superb addition to Civil War collections.

Booklist

“The pioneering cameramen of the Civil War wrought shocking images that stir and haunt us still. Lens of War is likewise groundbreaking, an album of essays that mines 1860s photographs for new insight into the war and its memory. Images I’ve stared at since boyhood—and others I’d never seen—come into fresh focus through the scholarly yet personal gaze of leading historians. This revelatory and highly readable book will captivate new and longtime students of the Civil War alike.”—Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“This book changes the way we see the American Civil War. By looking intently at photographs—some familiar and some rarely seen—these expert interpreters reveal aspects of the war visible in no other way. The elegant essays, like the images they examine, are windows into fascinating lives.”—Edward L. Ayers, President, University of Richmond

"A brilliant starting point for truly understanding the Civil War." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This collection of images, many of them familiar to Civil War enthusiasts,were selected to serve as a jumping-off point for the essays of 27 scholars on topics suggested by the photos. The photos, topics, and essays are an eclectic mix. By themselves, many of the photos would seem unremarkable, but the often brilliantly written essays compel the reader to view the photos with a fresh perspective. . . . Together, the photos and essays make a superb addition to Civil War collections." —Booklist

"Lens of War is refreshingly episodic and individualized, with the best essays being deeply personal, Montaignean explorations of why the war still matters to individuals today."—Kenyon Gradert, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Lens of War meets the promise of the simple observation that prompted its creation. Additionally, this book provides an excellent analysis of representative images. Perhaps most importantly however, these timeless photographs are the central focus of this volume—a rare event among academics." —Military Images magazine

"The UnCivil Wars series . . . describes itself as 'dedicated to new ways of seeing and telling the American Civil War.' Lens of War actually manages to tell the war by seeing it. Moreover, it illuminates not only how photographs shape our understandings and memories of the war, but also how we teach it, and how images—even in black and white—will always hold a special power the written world alone simply cannot supply. With all of this in mind, the book is highly recommended to historians of photography and visual culture (it even includes a very helpful resource on Civil War photographic histories), but for historians of the Civil War it is—without question—a must read." —Matthew C. Hulbert, Civil War Monitor

From the Publisher

★ 2015-01-04
A pictorial guide to the changes in our historical views of the Civil War, curated by Gallman (History/Univ. of Florida; Northerners at War, 2010, etc.) and Gallagher (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Union War, 2012, etc.).Though these iconic photographs of the war were often included in scholarly works, the authors realized that few actually took the time to analyze the pictures themselves. This book opens a new page of considerations of the people, victims and ruins; the home front, slaves, women, guerrillas and "the Destructive War." Gallman and Gallagher asked a wide network of professors, authors and independent researchers to choose their favorite photo from the Civil War and write an essay about it. The result will awaken new awareness, but the rawness of the war may upset some readers. One author kindly warns animal lovers that his essay about a picture of a dead horse may be tough going. This isn't just a coffee-table book to pick up randomly, as the authors suggest; it can be read in a few hours, and each essay naturally moves readers on to the next. Though many of these photos have been "staged," in that bodies were moved or guns and survivors placed to improve composition, that doesn't reduce their power. These Civil War writers, experts and teachers each explain their reasons for choosing a photo; often, it harkens back to seeing it as a child and using that experience as a launching point for a career. The essays freely challenge the ethics of war photography; one asks, "When is it not all right to take an image of something?" When must we leave death alone? Pictures are natural entrees into imagination, but we must understand the difference between history and memory. Particularly noteworthy contributors include Harold Holzer, Joseph T. Glatthaar and Elizabeth R. Varon. A brilliant starting point for truly understanding the Civil War. As the authors point out, there is still much to explore.

Kirkus Reviews