""Lens Of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the ..." Topic

…Civil War".

"Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War is another fitting entry in Georgia's UnCivil Wars series, which has carved out a bit of a niche for itself publishing titles off the worn paths of Civil War publishing. The big idea is that contributing editors Matthew Gallman and Gary Gallagher would invite another 25 other historians to join them in selecting a photograph and writing an essay about it. The cliche that a picture is worth a thousand (or more) words certainly applies here and it's clear that photographic images have long possessed the ability to inspire budding Civil War scholars in ways unavailable to young minds discovering for the first time earlier conflicts like the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

All contributors were offered complete creative freedom in writing their accompanying essays. This could have been a mess for the editors but it turned out well in this case. Format is elective, either formal or informal and with or without scholarly notes. Many chose to explicitly personalize their essays by writing in first person and nearly all fell back on their training and included chapter notes.

The convention for essay collections large in number is to divide them into sections and that's done here, with dutiful grouping into five parts (Leaders, Soldiers, Civilians, Victims, and Places). These categories suggest the full range of images and there's no need to go into specific examples here. The book's subtitle refers to "iconic photographs" but there are some fairly obscure ones in there, too, although one supposes that most readers that have been Civil War enthusiasts for a long period of time will have seen then all before at some point…"

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Amicalement
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