It might be suggested that there is a hole in the heart of the historiography of the US Civil War, which is the lack of many social historical studies of ordinary American lives during the crisis – a study of civilians and soldiers caught up in the momentous and often violent events from which the new nation of the United States of America would be forged. We know well the political events of the collapsing crisis before 1861, and the military, economic and political aspects of the years of warfare and the trauma of postbellum reconstruction, but, in what was, essentially, people's war little systematic research has been undertaken of the popular voices of those that took part in or were affected by the Civil War itself.

The war's legacy was various but, in one aspect at least, unique. This aspect was the desire to capture the image of individuals and groups through the new technology of photography which produced a vast number of plates and prints in which ordinary faces stared out not just at their contemporary friends and relatives but also at us, at posterity. As well as these ghostly images ordinary people wrote letters, kept journals and wrote personal accounts or memoirs in an urge to comprehend what was happening to them and these present a wide-ranging source for those interested in Americans at war.

This is the starting point for Nelson and Sheriff, triggering their consideration of photography – depicting men, women and children, soldiers and citizens, black and white in a single frame. Nelson and Sheriff seek to return “to visibility as many people as possible” (xi), by seeking to tell “not only how the war shattered established ways of life but also how men, women and children scrambled to pick up the pieces” (xii).

Choosing for their five themes the road to war, the nature of the fighting and the attempt to gain final victory by both sides, the impact of the war at home, and reconstruction, Nelson and Sheriff provide a broadly chronological account of the Civil War from the perspective of the ordinary people who found themselves forced, firstly, to choose sides or find a way to avoid that choice and, secondly, to decide upon their course of action before the war, during it and at its conclusion. If there is a common thread it is the bloody link of violence and growing militancy which can be traced from “bleeding Kansas” through Fort Sumter, the long years of fighting and even the postwar world of western expansion. It seemed a short path for people to choose between the arming of the North to preserve the Union and the arming of the South in defence of southern rights.

As the war changed from its opening skirmishes to become “hard war,” the impact on daily life and ordinary lives increased. Guerrilla war especially after the Confederate passing of the Partisan Ranger Act spread warfare to many parts of America far removed from the formal lines of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in the East and the various armies in the West. As Nelson and Sheriff observe, “Confederate and Unionist guerrillas blurred the line between politics, warfare and crime” (100), hardening the nature of the war and increasingly blurring the line between civilian and soldier. More significantly, perhaps, women's roles in wartime changed, moving them from passive domesticity to active participation and in the process moving many of them from the home into the factory, the hospital, the ambulance and even the male world of the military camp.

As Ambrose Bierce noted in the Devil's Dictionary for the term “Republic,”

This is perhaps the war's final legacy, and as Nelson and Sheriff note,

That violence might be ruthlessly applied to eradicate problems where principles were perceived to be at stake was a lesson learned by ordinary Americans during the Civil War, as Nelson and Sheriff demonstrate in this innovative and engrossing study.