Showing posts with label American Civil War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Civil War. Show all posts

Sunday, November 11, 2018

11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month



Perhaps all wars require a mythic dimension to put alongside their otherwise irredeemable horror and brutality. The abduction of Helen by Paris adds a romantic sheen to what may actually have been a protracted struggle between the Achaean and Hittite Great Kings over trade access to Asia Minor.

In Homer's version of the Trojan War, of course, the irony of the whole thing lies in the fact that Helen is back as reigning Queen of Sparta by the beginning of the Odyssey, and is clearly inclined to see the whole thing as a youthful bagatelle. There's a slight edge to it all still, though.

In her version, she was the only one to recognise Odysseus when he entered the besieged city disguised as a beggar, and aided him in his mission, having (by then) repented her past indiscretions:
... since my heart was already longing for home, and I sighed at the blindness Aphrodite had dealt me, drawing me there from my own dear country, abandoning daughter and bridal chamber, and a husband lacking neither in wisdom nor looks.
Her husband Menelaus's account is, to say the least, a little different. He sees her as, if not an active collaborator with the Trojans, at any rate somewhat ambivalent in her support of the Greeks:
You circled our hollow hiding-place, striking the surface, calling out the names of the Danaan captains, in the very voices of each of the Argives’ wives. Diomedes, Tydeus’ son, and I, and Odysseus were there among them, hearing you call, and Diomedes and I were ready to answer within, and leap out, but Odysseus restrained us, despite our eagerness. [Odyssey 4, 220-89]
The Allied soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, just across the straits from Hissarlik, the probable site of ancient Troy, were by no means unaware of these parallels. Their classically trained young officers were, indeed, preoccupied by the subject - possibly to the exclusion of other, more vital, concerns.



Jean Giraudoux: La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu
[The Trojan War will not take place] (1935)


Take, for instance, Patrick Shaw-Stewart's famous poem "Achilles in the Trench":
I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Upon the Dardanelles:
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea;
Shrapnel and high explosives,
Shells and hells for me.

Oh Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese;
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not;
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros o'er the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.
The poem is valorised not only by those remarkable last two lines, but also by its author's own death, on active service, in 1917. I suppose what it's always recalled to me, though, rather than all of Achilles' dazzling deeds in the Iliad, are the last words we hear in his own voice, when he encounters Odysseus on his own journey to the Underworld:
Odysseus, don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead. [Odyssey 11, 465-540]


Kurz & Allison: First Battle of Bull Run (1861)


The American Civil War famously began in Wilmer McLean's front yard and finished in his back parlour.

McLean, a wholesale grocer, was so appalled by the experience of having his farm fought over in the first major engagement between the Union and Confederate armies, that he relocated his family in 1863. Unfortunately, the place he chose, an obscure little hamlet called Appomattox Courthouse, turned out to be the location of Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865.



That's what I mean by a mythic dimension. There's no real meaning in this strange coincidence, but it seems to betoken some kind of cosmic symmetry in things: a design behind all the relentless bloodshed human beings seem determined to mete out upon one another.



Wilfred Owen: Selected Poems (2018)


Another, of course, is the awful fatality of Wilfred Owen's life and death. He died, on the 4th of November 1918 - almost exactly one hundred years ago - in an assault on the Sambre–Oise Canal. However, as the Folio Society are at pains to remind us in the advertisement for their sumptuous new illustrated edition of his selected poems:
... his parents received the telegram announcing his death on 11 November itself, just as the church bells rang out in Shrewsbury to mark the end of the Great War.
There lies the apparent design. The poet who wrote in the draft preface to his as yet unpublished poems:
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour,
dominion or power,
Except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
could somehow not be permitted to survive the war. Like Abraham Lincoln, or Achilles himself, he had to fall victim to it in order to achieve his full status as a sacrificial victim.

"He died that we may live." That's the kind of unctuous platitude that tends to come out on these occasions. And yet, it's hard to avoid a sense of strangeness about the whole thing, about the idea that the author of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" could not himself be allowed to outlive the war that turned him into perhaps the greatest of all war poet since Homer.



Mary Renault: The King Must Die (1958)


Mary Renault perhaps puts it best, in her novel The King Must Die (about the myth of Theseus), where she tries to explain the Ancient Greek concept of moira as:
The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these things.
"The king must go willingly, or he is no king." Whether it is Abraham Lincoln going to Ford's Theatre to show himself to the public one last time, Wilfred Owen refusing to accept non-active service away from the Front Line, or Achilles weeping with Priam over the body of Hector, there is something superhuman about all these noble, almost transcendent gestures.

The armistice itself is replete with legends: many of them clustering around the strange symmetry of "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."



In the cult British TV Sci-fi classic Sapphire and Steel, for instance (pictured at the head of this post), the storyline called "The Railway Station" concerns an out-of-the-way deserted railway platform haunted by a First World War soldier.

The precise nature of his grievance, and the reason he's been able to gather so many other disgruntled souls around him, hinges on the armistice: specifically, on the equation he keeps on drawing on the windows of the building:
11 / 11 / 11 / 11 = 18
It turns out that he was killed eleven minutes into that eleventh hour, and was thus an altogether unnecessary sacrifice to the gods of war.



Thomas Keneally: Gossip from the Forest (1975)


An even more complex set of ironies is explored in Thomas Keneally's 1975 novel Gossip from the Forest (subsequently made into a powerful, atmospheric film), about the German deputation sent to negotiate the surrender, and the subsequent murder by a right-wing fanatic of their leader, politician Matthias Erzberger, whilst walking in the Black forest a few years later.

From the Forest of Compiègne to the Black Forest, in fact.



Lady Ottoline Morrell: Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves (1920)


I don't mind admitting, though, that my favourite of all of the poetic moments associated with the armistice is the one recorded in Siegfried Sassoon's great poem "Everyone Sang":
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Sassoon survived. He went on to write many (mostly disappointing) further volumes of poems, but also a wonderful series of war memoirs and autobiographies. He got married, had a son, lived a long life. So let's not get too beguiled by the beautiful symmetries and high-mindedness of these seductive legends:
It is well, as Robert E. Lee said, that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.


Or, as the somewhat more mordant A. E. Housman said in his "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.


A. E. Housman (1859-1936)


Monday, April 09, 2012

The Literature of the Civil War


[Thomas Nast: A Civil War Christmas (Harper's Weekly)]

"Haven't you read enough books about the Civil War?" asked Bronwyn the other morning, as she observed me once more starting my long journey through the well-thumbed pages of volume one of Shelby Foote's three-volume masterwork The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-74).

It's not an unreasonable question, really. I mean, she has had to watch me reading the four massive volumes of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), the three of Bruce Catton's Centennial History of the Civil War (1961-65) - not to mention his earlier trilogy about the Army of the Potomac: Mr Lincoln's Army, Glory Road and A Stillness at Appomattox (1951-53). What is it about that war that I find so fascinating?

I mean, it's not as if I don't read books about other iconic battles and wars: Martin Middlebrook on The First Day on the Somme (1971), Harriosn E. Salisbury on The Siege of Leningrad (1969), Antony Beevor on Stalingrad (1998), Adam Zamoyski on Napoleon's Invasion of Russia in 1812 (2004) ...


 
[Saint-Gaudens: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (1897)]

Perhaps it's just that there's something otherworldly about the whole thing. The heroes - Abraham Lincoln, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee - seem larger than life; the battles - though unimaginably violent - still full of a strange glamour and heroism. How does Robert Lowell put it, in "For The Union Dead" ?
On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year -
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…
I even wrote a poem about it once myself (at least that's what I think it's about):


 
[Matthew Brady: The Dead of Antietam (1862)]

Civil War

In my dream, everyone was waving at the Dutch Queen, as she drove slowly down our steep street to the sea. Grey-haired, dignified. I was watching the waves, I suppose, trying to get these lines. A small boy tried to drag me back to the crowd, but I pushed him away. He persisted. So did I. “Can’t you leave me alone?”
– Mairangi Bay (30 October, 2001)


Blue waves
upon grey rocks
the Union soldiers
storming Marye’s Heights
at the Battle of Fredericksburg

·

What shall we do
with the men who did this, General?
surveying the ransacked town
Kill them, said Jackson
Kill them all

·

The scent never comes off again
said the orderly
as he bandaged Burnside’s head
sawed-off legs and arms
spoiling in heaps nearby




I don't quite know what that dream about the Dutch Queen has to do with the price of fish, but the poem just seemed a bit too literal when I took it out.

The other three scenes all come from the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, where the Union army, under General Burnside, assaulted some well dug-in Confederates under Robert E. Lee, and were repulsed with appalling casualties ...

Coming back to the subject of the literature of the war, though, there really aren't many nineteenth-century American writers who didn't touch on it in some way: Dickinson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Mark Twain ... One could even argue that Huckleberry Finn is, albeit in an oblique sense, mostly about the "irrepressible conflict". All I've done here, accordingly, is list some of the more canonical examples. I've stuck mostly to those that I myself found entertaining to read:

• 


 
[C. Vann Woodward: Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981)]

Contemporary Writers on the War:

    Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823-1886)

  1. Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. 1981. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993.

  2. Woodward, C. Vann & Elisabeth Muhlenfeld. The Private Mary Chesnut: the Unpublished Civil War Diaries. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
    The most famous of Civil War diarists, Mary Chesnut was an intimate of Jefferson Davis and moved in the highest political circles of the Confederacy. Her "diary" was in fact a carefully calculated composition, expanded from the fairly sketchy notes she kept at the time (available in the second of the books listed above).

  3. Hiram Ulysses [Ulysses Simpson] Grant (1822-1885)

  4. Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs. 1885-86. Introduction by James M. McPherson. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

  5. Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs and Selected Letters. Ed. Mary Drake McFeeley & William S. McFeeley. The Library of America, 50. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1990.
    Grant's memoirs were written to stave off bankruptcy for his family as he sat dying of cancer in the last year of his life. His style is classic and simple, and goes a long way towards justifying Mark Twain's contention that this is the greatest war book since Julius Caesar. Well worth reading.


  6. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911)

  7. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings. 1870. Ed. R. D. Madison. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
    Higginson, whom we know now mainly because of his correspondence with Emily Dickinson, had a very interesting war, and wrote about it earnestly and informatively.


  8. Herman Melville (1819-1891)

  9. Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces: The Civil War Poems. Facsimile Edition. 1866. Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2000.

  10. Melville, Herman. The Poems of Herman Melville: Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War; John Marr and Other Sailors; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Douglas Robillard. 1976. Kent, Ohio & London: Kent State University Press, 2000.

  11. Melville, Herman. Published Poems: Battle Pieces; John Marr; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 11. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2009.
    Melville's poetry will never be as popular as his prose, confined as it is by contorted verse forms and conventional rhymes and tropes: however, there's a strange power in these poems written as the war unfolded. The facsimile edition above is particularly evocative.


  12. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

  13. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Picture of Slave Life in America. 1852. London: Richard Edward King, n.d.

  14. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Hollis Robbins. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2007.
    The book that started the whole thing off. I particularly recommend the lavishly illustrated annotated edition. My old battered nineteenth-century copy has a little more resonance, though.


  15. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

  16. Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days in America: Newly Revised by the Author, with Fresh Preface and Additional Note. 1882. The Camelot Series. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: Walter Scott, 1887.

  17. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry & Selected Prose and Letters. Ed. Emory Holloway. 1938. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1964.

  18. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts / Prefaces / Whitman on His Art / Criticism. 1855, 1891-92. Ed. Sculley Bradley & Harold W. Blodgett. 1965. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973.

  19. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. The Library of America, 3. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982.

  20. Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. 1980. A Bantam Books. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1982.
    Whitman's war poems, collected as "Drum-taps", are definitely worth reading, but the prose notes - written for the most part in Union hospitals in Washington, and collected in Specimen Days - are some of the finest writing about the war. One begins to see that he really is as great as people say.

 
[Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852 / 2006)]

• 


 
[Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage (1895)]

More Modern Writers on the War:

    Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)

  1. Benét, Stephen Vincent. John Brown’s Body. 1928. Ed. Mabel A. Bessey. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941.

  2. Benét, Stephen Vincent. Twenty-Five Short Stories. With an Appreciation, “My Brother Steve”, by William Rose Benét. New York: The Sun Dial Press, 1943.
    Hard to know what to say about this early attempt to write the great American epic . It's still quite entertaining to read, but unfortunately too old-fashioned and creaky to survive the onslaught of Paterson or The Cantos.


  3. Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-c.1914)

  4. Bierce, Ambrose. The Collected Writings. Introduction by Clifton Fadiman. 1946. New York: The Citadel Press, 1952.

  5. Bierce, Ambrose. In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. 1892. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941.

  6. Bierce, Ambrose. The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary: With 851 Newly Discovered Words and Definitions Added to the Previous Thousand-Word Collection. Ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins. Preface by John Myers Myer. 1967. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
    Undeniably effective, Bierce's war stories defy easy classification: "cynic" doesn't quite do it somehow: death-worshipper is more like it. However his sense of humour, morbid though it is, goes some way towards redeeming him.


  7. Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

  8. Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Ed. John T. Winterich. With Civil War Photographs. London: The Folio Society, 1951.

  9. Crane, Stephen. Prose and Poetry: Maggie: a Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of Courage; Stories, Sketches, and Journalism; Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. The Library of America, 18. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.
    Probably the most famous Civil War novel ever written, The Red Badge of Courage might be said to have somewhat unfairly overshadowed the rest of Crane's work: particularly the poetry.


  10. Thomas Keneally (1935- )

  11. Keneally, Thomas. Confederates. 1979. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1981.
    After the excellent Gossip from the Forest (1975), about the last days of World War I, and before publishing Schindler’s Ark in 1982, Keneally wrote this interesting account of the first Confederate invasion of the North, a kind of dress-rehearsal for Gettysburg, culminating in the Battle of Antietam: very underrated, I'd say.


  12. Michael Shaara (1928-1988)

  13. Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels. Maps by Don Pitcher. 1974. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.
    Much praised (and rightly so), this brilliant historical novel had the misfortune to be used as the basis of the screenplay for the clumsy and overlong movie epic Gettysburg (1993), distinguished mainly by appallingly fake-looking sets of whiskers and beards on virtually all of the protagonists ...


  14. Gore Vidal (1925- )

  15. Vidal, Gore. Lincoln. 1984. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1985.
    Wonderfully insightful portrait of Lincoln as a cunning political schemer: concise and brilliant (unusually for Gore Vidal).
 
[Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914)]

• 


 
[Bruce Catton: The Centennial History of the Civil War (1961-67)]

Histories & Historians:

    Charles Bruce Catton (1899–1978)

  1. Catton, Bruce. Bruce Catton's Civil War: Three Volumes in One: Mr Lincoln's Army / Glory Road / A Stillness at Appomattox. 1951, 1952, 1953. New York: The Fairfax Press, 1984.

  2. Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. 3 vols. Vol. 1: The Coming Fury. 1961. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.

  3. Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. 3 vols. Vol. 2: Terrible Swift Sword. 1963. New York: Fall River Press / London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2009.

  4. Catton, Bruce. The Centennial History of the Civil War. 3 vols. Vol. 3: Never Call Retreat. 1965. New York: Washington Square Press, 1967.

  5. Catton, Bruce, & William Catton. Two Roads to Sumter: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and the March to the Civil War. 1963. Phoenix Press. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., n.d.
    Bruce Catton appears to be falling out of favour a bit now, which is a shame, as his books on the Civil War, albeit written from a Northern perspective, are still extremely readable and informative ...


  6. Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. (1916-2005)

  7. Foote, Shelby. Shiloh: A Novel. 1952. London: Pimlico, 1992.

  8. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 1 – Fort Sumter to Perryville. 1958. London: Pimlico, 1993.

  9. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 2 – Fredericksburg to Meridian. 1963. London: Pimlico, 1993.

  10. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. 3 – Red River to Appomattox. 1974. London: Pimlico, 1993.
    Foote corrects the Union bias of earlier historians: an unabashed Southerner, he achieves a kind of imaginative empathy with the principal protagonists in the drama which is unlikely ever to be repeated or surpassed. This is certainly the best history of the war to date. It is a military history above all, though - if you want political insights, then Foote still needs to be supplemented by various others.


  11. Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943- )

  12. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
    Asserting that Lincoln was a political genius is not exactly a controversial claim, but Goodwin does make a gripping narrative of his relations with the other members of his war cabinet.


  13. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

  14. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1939.

  15. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years. One-Volume Edition. 1926 & 1939. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1954.
    The four volume "War Years" is a terrifyingly detailed, virtually day-by-day account of Lincoln's tenure of the White House ... It's actually surprisingly readable if that kind of thing interests you, though. It does me.


  16. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)

  17. Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. 1962. A Galaxy Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
    An indispensible companion to the nineteenth-century literature of the war - quite disjointed, and without a clear beginning or end (hence the contemporary comparisons to Plutarch, rather than Caesar or Thucydides), it still provides the best overview of these books a general reader could hope for ...
 
[Bruce Catton: The Army of the Potomac trilogy (1951-53)]


• 


 
[Shelby Foote (1990)]

Films & Photographs:

  1. Burns, Ken. The Civil War, dir. Ken Burns, prod. Rick Burns, writ. Geoffrey C. Ward, narrated by David McCullough (USA, 1990). Complete 3-DVD set:
    1. 1861: The Cause (1989)
    2. 1862: A Very Bloody Affair (1989)
    3. 1862: Forever Free (1989)
    4. 1863: Simply Murder (1989)
    5. 1863: The Universe of Battle (1989)
    6. 1864: Valley of the Shadow of Death (1989)
    7. 1864: Most Hallowed Ground (1989)
    8. 1865: War is All Hell (1989)
    9. 1865: The Better Angels of Our Nature (1989)

  2. Ward, Geoffrey C. The Civil War: An Illustrated History. Based on a Documentary Filmscript by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ric Burns, & Ken Burns. 1990. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
    We might as well stop kidding ourselves: this is the source of most modern interest in the war. Ken Burns' documentaries do tend to have a rather formulaic air, and there is a bit of a pious tone to them, too, but it's still hard to see this one as anything short of a masterpiece. He did the job, once and for all, and did it well.

  3. Davis, William C., & Bell I. Wiley, ed. The Civil War: The Compact Edition. Fort Sumter to Gettysburg. The Image of War, 1861-1865, 1: Shadows of the Storm / 2: The Guns of ’62 / 3: The Embattled Confederacy. 1981 & 1982. Introduction by William C. Davis. Civil War Times. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1998.

  4. Davis, William C., & Bell I. Wiley, ed. The Civil War: the Compact Edition. Vicksburg to Appomattox. The Image of War, 1861-1865, 4: Fighting for Time / 5: The South Besieged / 6: The End of an Era. 1982 & 1983. Introduction by William C. Davis. Civil War Times. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1998.
    Nice modern collection of Civil War photographs. There are many such compilations: the iconography of the war is a considerable subject in itself. I do like the convenience of these volumes, though.

 
[Shelby Foote: The Civil War, vol. 1 (1958 / 1993)]