The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause

In part because historians have preferred to use photographs to illustrate the Civil War and partly because the South's heat and humidity destroyed many extant copies, the popular lithographs and engravings of the ""Lost Cause'' have been neglected, even by museums, where they frequently were stored unframed, uncatalogued and unrepaired. Here print historians Neely, Holzer and Boritt offer a wide selection of such prints (141 in total), which, ironically, mainly were produced by Northern printmakers for Southerners who wanted to revive and sustain the region's identity after the Confederate defeat in 1865. Images include heroes, martyrs and emblems of the Confederacy and are presented in varying size and quality``beautiful pictures, crude and ugly ones, large ones and small, maudlin scenes and inspiring ones.'' In this pioneering study, the authors provide an extensively researched, scholarly text that places this popular art in its cultural and commercial context. (September)