"This volume collects twenty-two black & white images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the war. Focusing on images that range from a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, to a census graph published in the New York Times, to a cutout of a child's hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front, the essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of the world around them"--