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Showing results 1 – 6 of 6

A Civil War soldier’s letters: “Save them if it cost the farm”

George Tillotson from Greene, New York, enlisted with the 89th New York Infantry in November of 1861. This ambrotype (photograph made on glass) and a series of letters from the summer of 1862 remind us that soldiers and their families faced hardships on the home front as well as on the battlefield. George had been in the army for five months and was stationed at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, when his wife, Libby, sent him the photograph featured here. The photograph was damaged in the mail and began a heartbreaking series of...

Select images from the American Civil War

In October 1862, Mathew Brady opened a photography exhibition at his studio in New York City. Entitled The Dead of Antietam, the exhibition attracted large crowds and brought the war home in a way that news articles and casualty listings could not. On October 20, 1862, an editorial in the New York Times explained that “the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the...

Essay

Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

During the mid-nineteenth century, American...

Glossary Term – Person

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a New York journalist and reformer. In 1890, Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, an exposé describing the terrible living conditions in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. The successful book inspired public outcry for urban reforms.

“High Bluff, Black Buttes,” from The Great West Illustrated by Andrew J. Russell

Primary Source

The Great West Illustrated, 1869

The exploration and settlement of the American West coincided with the development of the medium of photography. Photographic images, reproduced in books and newspapers and available for purchase on their own, helped shape Americans’ perceptions of the West by reinforcing ideas about the region as a pristine wilderness of spectacular natural wonders; as a symbol of the future and the realization of manifest destiny; and as a land of economic opportunity, where fortunes could be made by extracting natural resources.

Andrew J. Russell...

Recommended Resource

New Deal Network

New Deal Network