In the Civil War era, Matthew Brady and his staff became the country's foremost photographers of battle scenes and military life, traveling widely throughout the warring states with their cameras. Brady, who learned the rudiments of photography from Samuel Morse (the inventor of Morse code), had established his own daguerreotype studio in New York in 1844. By the time of the war, however, Brady was suffering from extremely poor eyesight, so many of the photographs credited to him from this time were in fact taken by his staff. Nonetheless, he amassed a priceless archive of images of the war -- some 6,000 of them -- with subjects as diverse as politicians, military leaders, and soldiers in the field, as well as devastating scenes of carnage and destruction taken shortly after the battles, and portraits of home life during the war. "Brady's Civil War" is, in many ways, the complete realization of Brady's dream of bringing his photographs to the world at large, as it not only offers more than 300 stunning Civil War photographs but also sets the record straight.
