The Cost of War: A Visual Summary of Civil War Devastation by Garry Adelman and Chris Mackowski is offered exclusively through the American Battlefield Trust. This booklet offers a brief visual summation of the many costs of war, as shown through Civil War-era photography. Trigger warning: While the authors have avoided the most graphic images, please be aware that this piece may not be appropriate for all audiences.
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How do you measure the cost of war?
Do you measure it by the number killed? Does a tally of the dead do justice to those lost lives?
How do you count the wounded? The men held in captive? The heartbroken families? How do you count the widows and orphans and broken communities? Can you put a dollar amount on the factories destroyed, homes abandoned, landscapes left desolate?
The Cost of War offers a visual summary of the many ways the American Civil War impacted both North and South – in the cities, in the countryside, and on the battlefields. Each image offers a different way of seeing war’s cost and, in doing so, hopefully leads us to a better understanding of “the last full measure of devolution.”
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes there are no words. Sometimes, it is our solemn duty just to bear witness and picture in our minds that cost of war.
Many of the places depicted on these pages are extant today, and we hope you will visit these battlefields and historic sites. Many of these sites were preserved by the members and supporters of the American Battlefield Trust. To become a member or learn more about the American Battlefield Trust, visit www.battlefields.org.
- Softcover booklet, saddle-stitched binding with staples.
- Size: 8.5 x 11 x 0.375 inches
- Length: 44 pages
- ISBN: 978-0-9988112-5-3
- Printed in USA