Images of America Sale

The effective end of the American Civil War on April 9, 1865, had hardly sunk in when, only five days later, another disaster stunned the battered and bloodied nation. On the night of April 9, Pres. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. There would be time for vengeful thoughts later, but first the Great Emancipator was going to get a royal send-off. At the center of what would become a three-week national funeral was a spectacular train that would carry Lincoln’s remains, and those of his deceased son, from Washington, DC, to Springfield, Illinois. “The Lincoln Special” steamed slowly out of spring mists, allowing thousands of mourners lining the tracks a lingering view. It was a logistics miracle; a romantic pageant of sorrow and wonder, carried off flawlessly. Through the tears, however, was a sense that America’s identity had turned a corner and was about to enter a dynamic and hopeful future.

Author of nine books, Michael Leavy is an avid Civil War and railroad historian. Leavy has searched through archives to locate rare photographs and new details and dispel some lingering myths surrounding this tragic but formative American event.

West Virginia in the Civil War chronicles the role West Virginians played in the Civil War through the use of vintage photograph

West Virginia, Child of the Storm, was the only state formed as a result of the Civil War. West Virginia witnessed battles, engagements, and guerrilla actions during the four years of the Civil War. The struggle between eastern and western Virginia over voting rights, taxation, and economic development can be traced back to the formation of the Republic. John Brown's 1859 raid on the United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry played a major role in the Civil War, which started in western Virginia with the destruction of Baltimore & Ohio Railroad property. When Virginia voted to secede and join the slave-holding Confederacy, the counties of western Virginia formed the pro-Union government known as the Restored Government of Virginia in Wheeling. West Virginia in the Civil War chronicles the role West Virginians played in the Civil War through the use of vintage photographs.

Cincinnati played a large part in creatng a refuge for escaped salaves and in the Underground Railroad movement.

Nearly a century after the American Revolution, the waters of the Ohio River provided a real and complex barrier for the United States to navigate. While this waterway was a symbol of freedom and equality for thousands of enslaved black Americans who had escaped from the horrible institution of enslavement, the Ohio River was also used to transport thousands of slaves down the river to the Deep South. Due to Cincinnati's location on the banks of the river, the city's economy was tied to the slave society in the South. However, a special cadre of individuals became very active in the quest for freedom undertaken by African American fugitives on their journeys to the North. Thanks to spearheading by this group of Cincinnatian trailblazers, the Queen City became a primary destination on the Underground Railroad, the first multiethnic, multiracial, multiclass human-rights movement in the history of the United States.

There were over 75 raids and battles that took place in Maryland during the Civil War, including Bloody Antietam—the bloodiest day in American military history.

As a border state between the North and South during the Civil War, Maryland's loyalties were strong for both sides. The first casualties of the war occurred during the Baltimore Riot of April 19, 1861, when members of the 6th Massachusetts Regiment were attacked by Confederate supporters while traversing through the city on their way to protect Washington, DC, from attack. Ten days later, Maryland chose not to secede from the Union by a vote of 53-13. On September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place at Bloody Antietam. At the end of the day, nearly one in four men would be a casualty of the battle, making it the bloodiest day in American military history. There were over 75 skirmishes, raids, and major battles that took place in Maryland during the Civil War. Through vintage photographs, Maryland in the Civil War shares the state's rich military heritage.

Images of America: Tennessee's Confederates draws upon photographs, many previously unpublished, to tell the stories of confederate soldiers from the Volunteer State.

Like other slave-holding border states, Tennessee initially elected not to join the newly formed Confederates States of America. However, with the attack on Fort Sumter and the call for troops to put down the rebellion, Tennessee governor Isham Harris telegrammed President Lincoln, ""Tennessee will not furnish a single man for the purpose of coercion, but 50,000 if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brothers."" In early June 1861, the state voted to secede from the Union and soon joined the Confederacy. Ultimately, Tennessee provided nearly 187,000 men to the Confederate cause serving in 110 regiments and 33 battalions. Photographs are from the collections of the Tennessee State Museum, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Tennessee Historical Society, and private collections.

Approximately 110,000 soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies fought along the banks of Antietam Creek in the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.

In 12 hours of fighting, approximately 23,000 men fell, either killed, wounded, or missing, forever scarring the landscape around the town of Sharpsburg. Established as the Antietam Battlefield Site in 1890, Antietam National Battlefield became a National Park Service landmark in 1933. The park grew from 33 acres in the 1890s to encompassing over 3,000 acres today. Some of the Civil War’s most recognizable landmarks now sit within its boundaries, including Dunker Church, Bloody Lane, and Burnside Bridge. The events that occurred across the fields and woodlots around Sharpsburg and along Antietam Creek bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to Antietam National Battlefield every year.

Kevin Pawlak serves as a certified battlefield guide at Antietam National Battlefield. Antietam National Battlefield is filled with historic photographs of the battlefield and its development from the collections of Antietam National Battlefield Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the United States Army Heritage and Education Center, private collections, and more.

Remembering Mississippi's Confederates is a collection of never-before-seen images which document the history of these soldiers.

The Confederate States of America engaged in a battle for national survival that lasted four long and incredibly bloody years. The conflict went on for so long because thousands of rebels were willing to lay down their lives and defend their homes to the last man and last cartridge. Many of these soldiers were Mississippians—approximately 78,000 citizens of the Magnolia State can be documented as having served in the Civil War. Of this number, over 27,500 died either of disease or in combat. Remembering Mississippi's Confederates is a photographic tribute to the men who fought so gallantly for their state. Many of the images in this volume have never been published and come from the proud descendants of the soldiers themselves; others were acquired from collections spread across the United States.

On March 19–21, 1865, nearly 80,000 soldiers clashed near the small hamlet of Bentonville, North Carolina, in a bitter battle that would prove to be the largest ever fought in the state and one of the last major battles of the Civil War.  Over the following decades, residents, descendants, and historians preserved the Bentonville story through monuments, markers, tours, and more. A hundred years after the battle, representatives of the state of North Carolina dedicated a permanent museum and created Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site. Over the following years, North Carolina Historic Sites, with the American Battlefield Trust, has preserved and interpreted the battlefield at Bentonville—with over 2,000 acres preserved as of 2023. Today, the site continues to tell the multitude of Bentonville stories, including the battle, its aftermath, and the community that surrounds it. /Collecting photographs from several North Carolina state agencies, historical societies, and descendants of veterans and community members, this book tells the visual history of the battlefield as a site of memory. Several works exist to tell the history of the battle, but this is the first history of the battlefield itself. Authors Colby Lipscomb and Derrick Brown have decades of experience at the battlefield as visitors and, currently, as staff members. 

The city of Palatka has one of the richest, most vibrant histories in the entire state of Florida, and with this book, readers will enjoy an insightful and interesting look into the past. The Palatka story includes tales of the Spanish and British colonial periods, the US territorial years and statehood, the Civil War and the golden age that followed, and the challenges and opportunities of the 20th century. Palatka’s golden age was a time when the “Gem City of the St. Johns” was the most important port city on the river and a thriving tourist center, described nationally in such glowing literary terms that the leading figures of the time, including presidents, business tycoons, and intellectual greats, flocked to its hotels. In the mid-1880s seven steamboat lines operated out of Palatka. On Thursday evenings, as many as 25 to 30 steamboats could be seen at the city’s docks, as that was the night oceangoing vessels arrived from Charleston and Savannah. The introduction of four major railroads in the 1880s enhanced Palatka’s place even further.

Author Gregory Leonard is well versed in the history of northeast Florida, having developed and presented numerous visual histories of its communities and previously written another title for Arcadia. This book was created to bring Palatka’s history to life, a story rivaling that of its famous neighbor, St. Augustine, 30 miles to the east.

The fourth president of the United States, James Madison, and his wife, Dolley, stamped their influence throughout Culpeper, Orange, Madison, and Rappahannock Counties with their plantation, Montpelier, and the enslaved men and women who supported them.

One of those enslaved men, Paul Jennings, whose sons later became Union soldiers during the Civil War, penned his memoir in 1865. The legacy of slavery undergirds the region, and its ravages are undeniably on the faces of minority residents. The Civil War also has a footprint throughout the region; one example is the Battle of Cedar Mountain where, more than 85 years later, the first regional high school for minority children was built. Celebrants include World War I veteran Newman Nighten Gibson, of the 370th Infantry; Nannie Helen Burroughs, who founded a school for African American girls in Washington, DC; and Edna Lewis, who became a master chef in New York in her 30s and later was honored by the US Postal Service on a forever stamp.

This volume explores the history of Vicksburg National Cemetery, reveals recent discoveries, and notes how the addition of various elements through the years helped to beautify this sacred ground. It examines the lives of a small fraction of the cemetery’s approximately 18,000 interments, which include veterans of the Mexican-American and Civil Wars through the Korean War and three Vietnam memorials. Included among the interments are cemetery superintendents, a Civil War nurse, a female veteran, a member of a popular local band (the Red Tops), a former Vicksburg alderman, a Tuskegee airman, and a Vick family descendant (Vicksburg’s namesake). Military service is the common thread that all of them share. This book focuses on the untold stories of those interred within the hallowed ground of Vicksburg National Cemetery.

Elizabeth Hoxie Joyner—a retired employee of the National Park Service, museum curator, and author of USS Cairo in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of Modern America series—has tracked down images from a variety of sources around the country to illustrate who these people were, what they did, and the sacrifices they made to protect this great nation. A burial index is also included that documents the section and number of each interment to aid in grave location.

Through photographs of veterans and reunions, monuments, and tombstones, Hardy shows the many ways that the old Confederate soldiers are commemorated across the Old North State.

The American Civil War was scarcely over when a group of ladies met in Raleigh and began to plan commemoration for the honored Confederate dead of North Carolina. In 1867, they held their first memorial service. Two years later in Fayetteville, the first monument to the state's fallen Confederate soldiers was erected. Over the next 14 decades, countless monuments were commissioned in cemeteries and courthouse squares across the state. Following Reconstruction, the veterans themselves began to gather in their local communities, and state and national reunions were held. For many of the Confederate veterans, honor for their previous service continued long after their deaths: accounts of their sacrifice were often chiseled on their grave markers.

This pictorial history illustrates the Tennessee River's influence on Northwest Alabama and people, places, and events that have shaped the area’s cultural and natural history.

For centuries, the Tennessee River has shaped the lives of northwest Alabamians. Native peoples made their homes on its shores, living on the rich resources found in its waters and on its banks. Early Europeans and Americans recognized the river's importance in connecting east with west, although traveling the 40-mile stretch of rocky shoals between present-day Decatur and Florence was difficult. Overcoming that navigation challenge led to such 19th-century technological advances as the Tuscumbia, Courtland & Decatur Railroad—the first rail line west of the Appalachian Mountains—and the Muscle Shoals Canal. During the Civil War, skirmishes over control of factories, rail lines, and bridges characterized most military activity in northwest Alabama. In the 20th century, the construction of Wilson Dam and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority improved the quality of life and increased economic opportunities in northwest Alabama.

One of the oldest counties in Arkansas, Clark County was established in 1818 as part of the Missouri Territory and named for Missouri governor William Clark, also of the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

The presence of the Caddo and Ouachita Rivers and its location on historical travel routes—the Southwest Trail, the Military Road, and the Bankhead Highway—contributed to settlement and economic development from a frontier town to today. Arkadelphia, the county seat since 1842, has been a center of higher education since the late 19th century, with two universities, Henderson State and Ouachita Baptist. Each year the two universities compete in the famed “Battle of the Ravine,” dating back to 1895, the only college football rivalry in the nation for which the visiting team walks to the game. In March 1997, much of Arkadelphia’s main business district and several residential districts were leveled by a devastating F-4 tornado. After the process of recovery and rebuilding, the city continues to flourish as the county’s center of government, commerce, medicine, and education. 

Dr. Lisa Speer is the university archivist and a professor at Ouachita Baptist University. Speer previously served as director of the Arkansas State Archives and state historian from 2013 to 2018. She also serves as vice president of the Clark County Museum board. The photographs featured in this volume came primarily from the archives at Henderson State University, Ouachita Baptist University, and the Clark County Museum.

New York City was the center of business, commerce, manufacturing, culture, and war spirit in the North during the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln gained an important national audience at the Cooper Institute in February 1860.

Tens of thousands of young men enlisted in the city and marched off to fight. Factories churned out materiel for the soldiers. Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass mobilized African American support for the Union. Foreign dignitaries were the subject of grand celebrations on Broadway. Immigrants raised celebrated ethnic regiments, and nationally renowned newspapers debated the pressing issues of the day. In short, the city was a vital engine that powered Union efforts. Yet New York was also a divided metropolis where political differences were hashed out—sometimes violently. The deadliest urban racial violence in American history took place in Manhattan in July 1863. In this book, New Yorkers regain their place at the center of the Union war effort on both the battlefield and the home front.

Acclaimed historians Jonathan W. White and Timothy J. Orr bring New York City’s Civil War story to life through photographs and illustrations drawn from libraries, archives, and private collections around the United States. Foreword author Harold Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and a leading historian of Lincoln and the Civil War in New York City.