Photographs taken in the field provide an extraordinary commentary upon the Civil War

"Lee and Young have admirably elucidated this foundational volume in the history of American photography by developing references that emerge from prior readings of these images, as well as thoughtfully producing new ways of seeing the landscapes Gardner presents. The book makes available to a wide audience one of the most important photographic records of any war and certainly the most interesting visual record of the American Civil War. This is superior scholarship."—Shirley Samuels, author of Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War "Anthony Lee and Elizabeth Young's deceptively slim volume is a complex, enlightening, and elegant study of a significant Civil War-era document that also greatly enhances our understanding of nineteenth-century visual culture. The analysis and format of this collaborative effort will serve as a model for cultural scholarship for years to come."—Joshua Brown, author of Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America "In this beautifully written analysis of one of the most important works of nineteenth-century American photography, Lee and Young restore Gardner's Sketch Book to its rightful place as a key document of American history. At once a report of a newsworthy event and a meditation on its historical meaning, Gardner's album is less unmediated reportage than a carefully constructed argument. In clear, lucid prose, Lee and Young help us understand just how Gardner made this work that helped fix the Civil War in American memory."—Martha A. Sandweiss, author of Print the Legend: Photography and the American West

This volume contains one hundred of the greatest war pictures ever taken. Union troops in battle, Lincoln at Antietam, the ruins of Richmond, Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and more. It became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers would come to know the war. This classic also became foundational in the history of American photography, combining, for the first time, words and images in a sophisticated and moving account.

Published to coincide with the 150th anniverary of the battle of Gettysburg, features both familiar and rarely seen Civil War images from such photographers as George Barnard, Mathew Brady, and Timothy O'Sullivan.

Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War. What is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international workers’ rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s career and the work of his studio in Washington, DC, by situating his photographic production within the era’s discourse on social and political reform. Drawing on previously unknown primary sources and original close readings, Makeda Best reveals how Gardner’s activism in Scotland and photography in the United States shared an ideological foundation. She reads his Photographic Sketch Book of the War as a politically motivated project, rooted in Gardner’s Chartist and Owenite beliefs, and illuminates how its treatment of slavery is primarily concerned with the harm that the institution posed to the United States’ reputation as a model democracy. Best shows how, in his portraiture, Gardner celebrated Northern labor communities and elevated white immigrant workers, despite the industrialization that degraded them. She concludes with a discussion of Gardner’s promotion of an American national infrastructure in which photographers and photography played an integral role. Original and compelling, this reconsideration of Gardner’s work expands the contribution of Civil War photography beyond the immediate narrative of the war to comprehend its relation to the vigorous international debates about democracy, industrialization, and the rights of citizens. Scholars working at the intersection of photography, cultural history, and social reform in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic will find Best’s work invaluable to their own research.