Images from the Storm

This used hardback book has very obvious wear. The book does have some extensive water damage to the cover, and the dust jacket is missing. The binding is damaged but the integrity of the inside pages of the book is still intact. Possible writing in margins, possible underlining and highlighting of text, but no missing pages or anything that would compromise the legibility or understanding of the text.

A retrospective study of the work of Robert Knox Sneden continues with this publication of hundreds more images from the Union cartographer's amazing collection of Civil War sketches, engravings, and maps.

If Vietnam was the first television war, the Civil War was the first to use mass-produced battlefield sketches and drawings as adjuncts to news reports, filling the pages of publications such as Harper's and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. One illustrator, a Union private named Robert Sneden, had plenty of opportunities to practice his art at close range, turning out nearly a thousand sketches, maps, and plans of the great battles in which he participated.

Images from the Storm, the follow-on from last year's bestselling Eye of the Storm, gathers more than 300 of those images that Sneden made of clashes at Second Manassas, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Yorktown and others. Some of the images are panoramic, capturing miles-long lines of infantry and cities under siege; others depict smaller scenes of war, such as dancing "contraband," or freed slaves, and the graves of the fallen. Of particular interest to historians are Sneden's drawings of the Confederate prison camps at Richmond and, notoriously, Andersonville, where he spent much of the year 1864 after he was captured by John Singleton Mosby's cavalry at Brandy Station, Virginia. One of those images became nationally known after the war, note the book's editors, accompanying an account of the war crimes trial and subsequent execution of the Andersonville camp commander.