American Heritage Century Collection of Civil War

In the mid-1880s, the Century Publishing Co. began a huge retrospective look at the Civil War. It eventually was turned into several volumes, the famous ``Battles and Leaders.'' This is credited with helping reunite the nation.``Battles and Leaders'' was illustrated by hundreds of woodcuts -- woodcuts because it was difficult to reproduce photographs at that time. The woodcuts were made from illustrations made on the spot by what were later called ``combat artists'' (``specials'' to the Civil War public), or from photographs by artists who had experienced the war first-hand.Nearly 400 of these illustrations (a few water colors, the rest woodcuts) are reproduced here from the files of Century.In few of them is there much derring-do. The Civil War battlefield was much more crowded than a modern one, but still it was a lonely place. Explosions, even the big one at the Battle of the Crater, are the merest wisps against the skyline of huge panoramas where armies joust but are barely visible.The soldiers themselves highly approved of these illustrations. The Century artists, they judged, ``got it right.''Editor Stephen Sears notes this is not a history of the Civil War, though it does carry through all the major campaigns in a structured fashion.Rather it is, for us, a look at what our ancestors took to be the look of the biggest event in American history.Most of the pictures in this folio are rather homely, almost humdrum. It is the ensemble of all of them that punches home the message.All in all, one of the better volumes for coming close to the common soldier's experience of that war.