Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the f...

Addressing texts produced by writers who lived through the Civil War and wrote about it before the end of Reconstruction, this collection explores the literary cultures of that unsettled moment when memory of the war had yet to be overwritten by later impulses of reunion, reconciliation, or Lost Cause revisionism. The Civil War reshaped existing literary cultures or enabled new ones. Ensembles of discourses, conventions, and practices, these cultures offered fresh ways of engaging a host o...