Robert E. Lee in War and Peace: The Photographic History of a Confederate and American Icon

Robert E. Lee is well known as a Confederate general and as an educator later in life, but most people are exposed to the same handful of images of one of America’s most famous sons. It has been almost seven decades since anyone has attempted a serious study of Lee in photographs, and with Don Hopkins’s painstakingly researched and lavishly illustrated Robert E. Lee in War and Peace, the wait is finally over.

Dr. Hopkins, a Mississippi surgeon and lifelong student of the Civil War and Southe...