By Dominick A. Serrano Collecting Confederate images has never been easy. The ambrotypes and cartes de visite have always been more costly and elusive than their Northern counterparts, and finding
By Michael Huston Twenty years after John Morton joined the 19th Iowa Infantry, he contacted his comrades in Company C and asked them to send him their likenesses. Many responded,
By Ronald S. Coddington, with artifacts from the Ken Fleming Collection Asa Adell Holbrook enjoyed telling stories about his war service. Even during his last days in a Soldiers’ Home
By Ronald S. Coddington On a September day in 1864, a Union sergeant stationed at the sprawling military hub in Louisville, Ky., put the finishing touches on a letter. It
First in a multi-part series of Abraham Lincoln imagery by MI Contributing Editor Chris Nelson, featuring photographs from the author’s collection Considering the world’s fascination with the government, economics and
By Ron Field Some of the original European hussars served as quasi-military auxiliaries raised in 1458 by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary to fight against the Turks. The hussars developed
When Scott Valentine began collecting identified Civil War cartes de visite in the pre-digital age, he felt a desire to tell the stories behind the faces. The search for information
Behind every Civil War portrait photograph lies a question that the person paying the bill had to consider: Which format do I choose? Two primary options were available. Hard plates,
By Michael R. Cunningham, Ph.D. During the 1850s, the U.S. War Department experimented with a variety of military accoutrements made with rubber and gutta percha. The items included canteens, holsters,
By Adam Ochs Fleischer In this installment, we stay in the Wolverine state to study an example used in Jackson by photographer Norman Erastus Allen. Like Kalamazoo, the city of
