In this wonderfully illustrated book, Joshua Brown shows that the wood engravings in the illustrated newspapers of Gilded Age America were more than a quaint predecessor to our own sophisticated media. As he tells the history and traces the influence of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, with relevant asides to Harper's Weekly, the New York Daily Graphic, and others, Brown recaptures the complexity and richness of pictorial reporting. He finds these images to be significant barometers for gauging how the general public perceived pivotal events and crises--the Civil...

Echoing from the mountainous Vosges front of World War I come the rare accounts of an elite French foot soldier--a chasseur a pied. Robert Pellissier, born in France in 1882, had grown up in the United States and was teaching at Stanford when the Great War broke out in his homeland. Returning as a volunteer, he saw uninterrupted months of trench warfare in the Vosges mountains of Alsace, the only region where French troops actually captured German territory, a sector largely neglected in World War I literature.

Pellissier's diary and his letters to relatives in America show a panorama of...