Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jefferson Davis, John Brown. We know their names and recall the place of each in our nation's history. But do we recognize their faces and those of the dozens of their contemporaries who forged a new and forward-looking America during the Civil War era? Faces of Discord is a look into the real faces of the leading historical figures of this turbulent and transformative time. Compiled from the collections of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, these depictions include those of Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, John S. Mosby, George Armstrong Custer, and many others who were painted, sculpted, and photographed by the foremost artists of the day. More than just arresting pictures in a book, these “faces of discord” represent historical portraits of the period, some of which were once owned by the famous sitters themselves and passed down to the Smithsonian by their descendants. The National Portrait Gallery is a fitting repository for these images, in part because the gallery occupies the building that was used as a barracks and hospital for Federal troops during the war and was the site of Lincoln's second inaugural ball. Faces of Discord also tells the stories of the extraordinary lives behind the faces that changed the course of American history. Selected exclusively from Smithsonian collections and illustrated within Faces of Discord are rarely seen personal possessions and memorabilia associated with many of these historical figures who still command our attention and so vividly animate these pages.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, June 15, 2012-Jan. 27, 2013.

Smithsonian Civil War is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book featuring 150 entries in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. From among tens of thousands of Civil War objects in the Smithsonian's collections, curators handpicked 550 items and wrote a unique narrative that begins before the war through the Reconstruction period. The perfect gift book for fathers and history lovers, Smithsonian Civil War combines one-of-a-kind, famous, and previously unseen relics from the war in a truly unique narrative. Smithsonian Civil War takes the reader inside the great collection of Americana housed at twelve national museums and archives and brings historical gems to light. From the National Portrait Gallery come rare early photographs of Stonewall Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant; from the National Museum of American History, secret messages that remained hidden inside Lincoln's gold watch for nearly 150 years; from the National Air and Space Museum, futuristic Civil War-era aircraft designs. Thousands of items were evaluated before those of greatest value and significance were selected for inclusion here. Artfully arranged in 150 entries, they offer a unique, panoramic view of the Civil War.

Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.

In viewing the Great War through the portraits of those involved, Paul Moorhouse looks at the bitter-sweet nature of a conflict in which valour and selfless endeavour were qualified by disaster and suffering, and examines the notion of identity - how various individuals associated with the war were represented and perceived. The narrative is structured chronologically, with thematic sections devoted to conflicting pairs - 'Royalty and the Assassin', 'Leaders and Followers', 'The Valiant and the Damned' - which reveal the radical differences between those caught up in the conflict in terms of their respective roles, aspirations, experiences, and, ultimately, their destinies. 'Leaders and Followers', for example, examines the dichotomy between the representation of senior military leaders such as Blumer, Foch, Haig and Hindenburg, who were responsible for directing the war, and that of the ordinary soldiers charged with executing it. While portraits of the generals emphasise their personal profile, gallantry and the trappings of military power, paintings of the rank and file are characterised by a tendency to anonymity, in which individual identity was subsumed with the impression of 'types'. Claude Rogers's imposing painting Gassed, for instance, presented the individual soldier as a kind of cipher, a depersonalised embodiment of common, degraded experience. Illustrated throughout with images both well known and less familiar, the book concludes with a section entitled 'Tradition and the Avant-Garde', which focuses on the struggle artists faced in finding an appropriate language in which to depict those who had experienced the unimaginable horror at the front: either by resorting to the steadying hand of tradition or a radical visual language of expressive distortion.

A remarkable account of the collapse of the Old South and the final years of a young boy’s privileged but afflicted life. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty twelve-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860—just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old South is published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded—often in horrific detail—an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South. Winner, 2018, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award