Lt. William Hoyle Nesbit, 21, was languishing in a Virginia hospital after having his arm shot off in the Battle of Gettysburg. A caregiver, trying to help, sent a dictated telegram to Nesbit’s father ...

""To glance at a Civil War paper is to be transported to a different era from the one in which we live today,"" writes Coopersmith in his introduction to this rich analysis of Civil War reporting. Yet ...

Noting that “Americans of the Civil War years enjoyed unprecedented levels of literacy and did not hesitate to record what they had seen, heard, and done in a flood of letters, diaries, and memoirs,” ...