Books: Matthew Brady's Portaits

Although “Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation” is billed as a biography, it actually reads as a by-now familiar story of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, parallel in an eerie way to the communication revolution we are experiencing in this...

Heroes and Memory

When I first arrived in America a few years ago, one of the first things I noticed was the road name, Jefferson Davis Highway. For a moment, I wondered whether I was trapped in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A: the Confederate States of America, where the South had won the...

Photos that Changed How We See War

Within hours of the fall of Fort Sumter, on April 14, 1861, damage from the Confederate bombardment of it that started the Civil War had been photographed. This was something new — the first time Americans would see images of war, as it really looked . . . the...