Battle Portraits

Portraits of Battle brings together biography, battle accounts, and historiographical analysis to examine the lives of a cross-section of Canadians who served in the First World War. All Canadians are taught about Vimy Ridge, but that celebrated victory was just one battle among many to shape the country’s experience of the war. These portraits of the formerly faceless men and women honoured on war memorials provide a fresh and nuanced perspective on the complex legacy of the Great War in Canadian history.

The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."

Portraits of Battle brings together biography, battle accounts, and historiographical analysis to examine the lives of a cross-section of Canadians who served in the First World War. All Canadians are taught about Vimy Ridge, but that celebrated victory was just one battle among many to shape the country’s experience of the war. These portraits of the formerly faceless men and women honoured on war memorials provide a fresh and nuanced perspective on the complex legacy of the Great War in Canadian history.

Military historian Max Hastings presents a richly textured study of what it meant to be a warrior in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, based on an examination of the experiences of 13 soldiers, an airman, and a sailor.

A collection of 100 original, rarely seen photographs of identified Union and Confederate soldiers and other participants in the Gettysburg Campaign, each accompanied by vivid accounts of their personal experiences based on letters, journals, newspaper reports, regimental histories and other documents. The photographs are wartime portraits of men and women presented to families, friends and comrades in arms. These unique artifacts, once found in parlor photo albums, fireplace hearths and bedstands, somehow survived the ravages of time and today are in the hands of private collectors. The faces of the individuals reveal the romance and horror of a generation at war. The stories that accompany each image detail triumphant and tragic events before, during and after the three-day fight. These individuals hailed from all walks of life—rich and poor, urban and rural, native born and immigrant, with varying levels of education and perspectives on life. Each profile is a microhistory. Together, they tell the larger story of Gettysburg in human terms. Among those you’ll meet: James M. “Roe” Reisinger of the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry, who suffered a wound and later received the Medal of Honor for his actions at on July 1; Helim S. Thompson of the 44th New York Infantry, severely wounded and left for dead on Little Round Top; Zachariah Angel Blanton of the 18th Virginia Infantry, wounded and captured in Pickett’s Charge; and Harriett A. Dada Emens, a nurse who cared for desperately wounded and sick in the Union army’s 12th Corps Hospital.

A uniquely rich portrayal of Tennesseans who fought and lost their lives in the Civil War is presented in this collection of stories and portraits that are joined with personal remembrances from recovered letters and diaries and detailed historical background.

Tenth volume of acclaimed series