History Note: The Civil War in color

Some painstaking work has resulted in colorized versions - as accurate as surviving Civil War gear, contemporary paintings, and old accounts could make them - of what the Civil War would have looked like if color photography had existed.  This set includes two of the people I most admire from this era, the oft-overlooked George H. Thomas (the masterful Union general no one could stop) and my fellow Mainer, Renaissance man Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.  Here too are the flamboyant George Armstrong Custer, the reflective President Abraham Lincoln, and a striking camp-tent portrait of Union Brigadier General David M. Gregg and his staff, showing the differing shades of blue in the Union uniforms.   (There actually were color photos in those days, but the art of capturing color was at an embryonic state of experimentation: no color photos of the battlefields exist.)