If you’ve never met a minuteman, TIME’s Light Box has some amazing photos you need to see.
Jonathan Smith, daguerreotype. Jonathan Smith fought in the Battle of Long Island on August 29, 1778. His unit was the first brigade that went out on Long Island, and was discharged in December after a violent snow storm. After the war he became a Baptist minister. He was married three times and had eleven children. The first two wives died and for some reason he left his third wife in Rhode Island to live with two of the children in Massachusetts. On October 20, 1854, he had a daguerreotype taken to give to a granddaughter. He died on January 3, 1855.
The book is a detailed guide to traditional music venues in Western Carolina and includes a cd with 26 songs by North Carolina artists including the likes of Ola Belle Reed, The Watson Family, The Kruger Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs and many others!
The 280-page book/cd set is a project of the NC Arts Council published in association with the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area and was printed by UNC Press.
The newest release from Star Route Books, Four Brothers in Gray, is now available! The book tells the story of Confederate soldiers Andy, Harrison, Calvin and Alfred Proffit. Star Route Books reprinted the book with permission from Wilkes Community College (who has copyrights to the 1975 work by Mary Alice Hancock.)
In it, Ms. Hancock tells about the Proffit family of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and the four sons of William and Mary Proffit that left home to fight for the South in the Great Rebellion. She uses the boys’ own words- excerpts taken from over 100 letters sent home to Lewis Fork by the boys and their cousins to trace their paths through the war.
Mary Alice Hancock began writing articles for magazines including the Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, American Legion Magazine, Progressive Farmer, Catholic Digest and VFW magazine. She wrote two fictional children’s books, Menace on the Mountain in 1968 which was eventually made into a two-part, television episode of The Wonderful World of Disney. Her second book, in 1969, was a non-fiction novel called Thundering Prairie about the Oklahoma Land Rush.
In addition to the narrative, transcriptions of 100+ of the brothers’ letters, which inspired Ms. Hancock, are included. Like other titles in the Star Route history series, Four Brothers in Gray includes contemporary photographs, drawings, illustrations and and period maps obtained from the National Archives, the Library of Congress, Virginia Military Institute, Harpers Pictorial History and many other resources.
Also included is family information, describing the relationships of the brothers, their cousins and in-laws, who are frequently mentioned in their letters. Their letters reveal the excitement of battle, the loneliness at the front, thoughts of home and their concern for family and nation.
The 320-page, black and white, softcover book, 7.44″ x 9.68″ (Crown Quarto size), is currently available at The Sparta Store in Sparta, N.C., and online at www.spartastore.com for $32, + tax and shipping. For more information on wholesale pricing, please contact Claire.
Start promoting your big summer event now! All banners are 15% Off from April 15-May 15.
We make beautiful, reusable, weather-proof vinyl banners for churches, corporations and civic groups. Bring your sketch and we’ll design your one-of-a-kind banner. Check out a few we’ve done in the past.
14 oz. vinyl banner material. Double metal grommets every 2 feet. Cut vinyl installed on white, black, red, blue, yellow or green banner. 22″, 34″ or 46″ high by whatever length you need! Contact us for pricing or call 336-372-3002.
Also ask about our rates for corrugated plastic yard signs.
We were recently lucky enough to purchase an original, unbound set of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War by Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden published by Star Publishing Co. in Chicago in 1866.
The books are filled with engravings of wartime photography and drawings that were made, mostly, while the war still raged. Much like today’s news, the articles were written during the conflict, so information was sometimes incorrect and wrong results may have been reported by those who were too close to the war.
Winfield Scott, scanned from a original 1866 copy of the set, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War by Imaging Specialists.
While this immediacy might lead a reporter to draw the wrong conclusions, it is the very thing to make the photographer or the artist draw the correct ones- the closer the graphic artist is to the conflict, the clearer he can depict it and we can see it. People dedicated to the graphic arts have left us a very good lens with which to look back in time, insulated as we are from the conflict by time and the well-meaning commentary of generations of historians.
The images we are left with allow us to see, for ourselves, into the eyes of our ancestors, more clearly than any previous process and certainly further back in time than any others have been able to see. With the invention of photography, we are the first in history to see the clear face of someone born 200 years before us.
Consider the skill, the care and the time invested in these images, that have lasted a century and a half and were amazingly close to the subjects depicted.
But, as we sometimes like to think in terms of degrees of separation, consider: The engravings in these books were printed on paper (1) from from a craftsman’s engraved plates (2) that were made from a photographic print (3) made from a glass negative (4) that recorded light bounced off a subject and through a lens. Or they were made from a drawing by an artist, presumably on site (3).
Mathew Brady’s photo of Winfield Scott was copied often by different artists. That the original is out of focus, probably accounts for minor differences in facial expression in each version. So, even among skilled artists, there are variations.
William Hennessy’s work for the Harper’s image, above, makes the General look a little more grizzled and rough than the photograph he worked from (below). Other artists depict a softer expression.
Winfield Scott by Mathew Brady. Original at the United States Library of Congress.
Even photography isn’t immune to the artist’s sympathies. Contrast, levels, curves, sharpening, cropping etc. are all adjustable and adjusted by everyone along the workflow from original to final printed piece or digital image, whatever the media.
Even if we ignore the idea of bias, two different shops can produce very different results. An internet search of any well known image will prove that even in the IT age, opinions, agendas, sympathies and levels of ability affect results.
These books are perfect for our use since they came to us as they were originally sold- as unbound signatures, so we can easily scan them. (Original customers could have the 32-page signatures casebound after they collected the entire set.) The quality of the printing is excellent and they are folio sized at approximately 11.375″ x 16.375″.
We’re happy to share this scan with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License – you can use it in any project for any purpose. Please include attribution of “Scan courtesy Imaging Specialists, Inc., Sparta, NC.”
