1863: The Crucial Year : A Sourcebook on the Civil War

American Albums from the Collections of the Library of Congress

by Carter Smith (Editor)

Uses a variety of contemporary materials to describe and illustrate certain key events of the Civil War that took place during 1863.

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third installment in a six volume collection put out by the Library of Congress that covers the Civil War. As with the other books in this collection, one of the book's primary goals is to provide a visual document of that period via prints, drawings, photographs, and lithographs. As such, it provides a nice summary of 1863, considered to be a crucial year in the war, despite the fact that its end was still two years away.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and several of the photographs depicting post battle carnage speak volumes about the brutal and bloody nature of this time in American history.

[Raymond Chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book seemed to be interesting. Although, it didn't really interest me too much since I mainly read sci-fi and fantasies. I did learn many things about 1863 and why it was one of the most crucial years in the 1800s. If I recommended this book to anyone, I would recommend it to someone who would be crazily interested in the history of the U.S or just in general interested in history. I wouldn't actually recommend this to a classmate based off of my own opinion just because of how boring it got after getting past the reasons why 1863 was a crucial year. I think the writing overall based off of my own opinion, was effective on informing us on why 1863 was crucial. The thing that makes this book really interesting i think would be because of the information we learn about the world back in the 1800s or what had happened, although, the weaknesses of this book would be how boredom eventually overcomes the book after an amount of time. If this book were to be a part of a series, I personally wouldn't read it.