During the 1880s, a German-born, Boston-based picture publisher successfully commissioned the most ambitious series of battle prints ever published. Louis Prang, best known as the "father of the Christmas card," hired noted military and marine artists to create original scenes of combat, and then reproduced their works in a wildly popular portfolio of chromolithographs. He called the set Prang's War Pictures. They were offered to an eager public accompanied by "descriptive texts" that told the story of each engagement through eyewitness recollection by the heroes of each action. The set...