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From: "H. Fazio" <>
Subject: [GM] Civil War History and Original Illustrations
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 11:24:31 -0600

Civil War in Pictures, Fletcher Pratt, 1955. Hardback, illustrated dust cover, 5-3/4x8-1/2, 256 pages, black & white illustrations. This book is in very good condition, as is the dust jacket, with no tears, markings of any kind, loose or dog eared pages. There is no highlighting, underlining, & the pages are supple. The book contains many illustrations, just as were seen in Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the 1860's. The illustrations are accompanied by historical text and by excerpts from the actual newspapers. Per the dust jacket:

"...Fletcher Pratt re-creates, through actual eyewitness reports in picture and story, the five long years of bloodshed, turmoil, and tragedy which brought the nation through its gravest trial.

Northern men fought. And Northern publications - principally Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly - sent great artists like Winslow Homer and A. R. Waud into the lines to cover the action. The camera had not yet come of age; Matthew Brady's photographs were largely unknown and cound not be directly reproduced. The North's view of the War remained to be shaped on a drawing boards from Baltimore to New Orleans.

The combat artists came and went unimpeded, unwittingly to fix the standards of modern pictorial reportage. They made their sketches under fire, their final drawings in the hospitals, gunboats, and mess-tents when the bloody day's work was done. Covering the famous highlights and little-known sidelights of the War, their illustrations preserve the faulty judgment and partisan passions of the moment - and the courage and anguish and mortality of the moment as well.

Set alongside original reports by the first professional war correspondents, these 300 rare illustrations call up the raids and riots; the ruins of Manassas Junction; McClellan's reluctance and the Mud Campaign; the ironclad's foray and the sniper's deathwatch; Jackson and Sherman
like a knife through the rear areas; Pinkerton's coups; Lee's mastery' Lincoln's "last" general; the
private war in the Red River's backwashes; the massed heroics at Gettysburg, Shiloh, and Lookout Mountain.

With Fletcher Pratt's crisp commentary weaving pictures and stories into a five-year dramatic whole, this big handsome volume restores to the Civil War a continuity, a visual excitement, a sense of reality it has long since lost in the retelling."

This really is a nice book, just filled with 256 pages of history and priceless illustrations.

$12.50 plus $2.50 media mail postage and handling.

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• [GM] Civil War History and Original Illustrations by "H. Fazio" <>