For the first time in a book, ninety-seven extraordinary, beautiful, and moving photographs from one of the nation's most important Civil War archives - more than five thousand photographs never before seen by the public that were recently discovered in the attic of the Medford Historical Society in Massachusetts.

Here are images of Confederate soldiers at Devil's Den, Rose Woods, Plum Run ... Union and Confederate dead in the trenches at Petersburg, where the war's bloodiest battle was fought ... the shell of a Gothic mansion near Falmouth, Virginia ... beautiful Charleston in the aftermath of war ... and the dark shape of Fort Sumter, site of the beginning of the end.

Many of the photographs are reproduced at their actual size; all are beautifully printed from tritone separations made from the vintage albumen prints. With an introduction by William F. Stapp, a leading authority on nineteenth-century American photography and former Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. The preface is by Mark E. Neely, Jr., whose biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Fate of Liberty, won the Pulitzer Prize.