our friendship and determination. he is not qualified and i was more qualified, he would not be upset about it. we help each other. we were in college and the bursar's office every semester trying to get a hold release. we did what we had to do and came up with creative stories.

and get on a payment plan. and it is really tough. it was so tough, how did you do it? you just got to pray and around you, and trying to take the first step and it will come. i pray for them because it happened for all three of us. >> continue watching booktv for more nonfiction authors and books. >> on booktv robert wilson recalls the life of civil war era photographer mathew brady. the first war to provide a photographic history was the civil war, thoroughly covered by brady and his team of photographers to to over 10,000

photos. this is a low under an hour. >> a great honor to be in this book store. a city of institutions. this is one of the great ones. it is so wonderful to see it thriving under bradley, and i hope continued to thrive for many years to come. give a nod to one person in the audience, my friend pat ferguson who read a wonderful book when under your civil war, freedom rising, you don't know what is right, you should. i hope is for sale here somewhere. it occurred to me to write about

mathew brady if you years ago as i was finishing the but the book about clarence king. scientific surveys of the west. and timothy o'sullivan is becoming important photographers, the first time photography had been used this way as part of a scientific expedition. and a protege of mathew brady. they met on staten island where brady had a home in the 1850s. and in a studio, broadway in manhattan, timothy o'sullivan grew up there. as i read about those sullivan,

i realize there really was not a first-rate book about mathew brady which really astonished me given his importance. take all of us who care about history, and know the name of mathew brady and increasingly in the last couple years have become aware of his photographs, 150th anniversary of the civil war, and less than 51 i started out. and after about a year reading about him doing research about the proposal for the book. it should have struck me given the industry of scholars and journalists like myself, bradley, if there wasn't a good book about mathew brady there

might be a reason. the truth is that there are two good reasons. one is for a man who was in the public ought for have a century whose name became a brand both for portrait photography and civil war photography who hung around with the journalists of his day and was acquainted with most of the people who mattered in his time, dedicated to making photography a medium for the recording of history, for all this he left as bradley said a my lightly marked trail. he did not keep a journal or write a memoir, run a handful of perfunctory letters and spoke about his career and detailed to a few journalists and friends. only late in life when the natural tendency of many people is to embroider the past. this is reason 1 for why such a central cultural figure of his time had no good biography.

reason 2 is in the years since his death, the paucity of fact has led some writers to go beyond brady's own embroidery to pure speculation and even fabrication. so the challenge was to dig deeper and be skeptical about what had already been written about him. one of the things i thought i knew about brady that were wrong, the first was almost everyone who knows anything about brady thinks they know about him which was he was not just the civil war photographer but he was in some sense the civil war photographer. he himself took all of those photographs we have become so familiar with in the last two years. it is true we see a number of the same photographs again and again. this one for instance called three confederate prisoners.

has just become a u.s. postage stamp. there are people from roanoke who convinced the postal service that one of these guys was a relative of theirs because this print had hung in there harbor for 80 years or something and i am not quite as gullible as the postal service. they were invited to the ceremony. it is theoretically possible one man could have scurried around and made many of the photographs we do know that are familiar especially when there are no photographs that all of the war's signal events ranging from the first battle of bull run to we surrender to grant at appomattox. there are no photographs at all of battles. brady did go to bull run where he may well have been the first man in history to attempt to take photographs under fire been

none of the photographs he took or tried to take survived that day. they were probably destroyed in the chaotic to put it mildly retreat of the union army on the afternoon of july 21st. he did have this heroic image of himself made the next day. thanks. one of the things i say in my book that reviewers seemed to like to pick up on is something like did he know what he was doing when he went to war? why did he dressed like the french landscape painter? he has what journalists often wore when they were covering the war but he has the watch and crosstie and jaunty hats.

anyway. this was a photograph meant to say he was there and he did manage to convince a number of publications in the weeks after the first battle of bull run that he had made photographs, but they were wrong in saying that, none do exist. after bull run where he may well have been spooked by his proximity to live ammunition he stayed miles away from any battlefield until about 150 years and one month ago, when he traveled to gettysburg about a week to ten days after the fighting had stopped. then there is another lapse of almost a year until soon after pearl harbor and the beginnings of the stalemate at petersburg when he went back on the field. he kind of went out towards

antietam on month after the battle bear but never really got within miles of it. and then that is really it as far as his physical appearance, anywhere near a civil war battlefield. he wasn't in richmond the day robert e. lee came back from appomattox. wandered back, five days to get back, thank you bradley. this is a photograph he took. brady had good luck getting places late, his rival alexander gardner had gone to richmond as many photographers had, right after the south abandoned it and it was set afire. the pictures were so stunning

and everyone had been focused on richmond from the beginning of the war so consequently they all went and took these pictures of burned out buildings and nobody went to appomattox so there are no pictures from appomattox at all. but anyway we had known lee from the mexican war and he had been superintendent at west point and there had been a tradition that west point to come down and be photographed at the studio in new york. he had a connection, a further connection from washington put him in touch with mrs. lee, and his son said there was nothing he liked less than having his picture taken, comes back from the war. imagine how weary he must have been, how disheartened.

and he agrees to be photographed at the next day on easter sunday. the day he agreed to do it was the day lincoln died. they're must have been some connection, he had been telling soldiers who had been coming up to his men go back to the farm, rebuild your lives, don't rabble rouser. he felt this may have been an opportunity to show great personal dignity, a man who is visibly morphing into a civilian in this picture, not really in full uniform. if you see the pictures of him from appomattox, he has this red sash, not the pictures but the paintings later and ceremonial sword and here he has three on, seems to be walking like a guy for whom the war is over.

anyway, this was one of brady's great debts as they say. as many as 10,000 civil war photographs are attributed to brady or his studio. how can that be? here is where things get complicated. brady began his career as a photographer in the daguerreotype era, opening a studio on lower broadway in 1844, only five years after the process had been introduced in paris. of busy portrait gallery as brady soon became required number of people to make a photograph, to make the customer happy if a customer wanted to walk away with a finished photograph, the metal plates on which the daguerreotypes appeared had been buffed and treated and after a play was

exposed the image had to be fixed, washed in a bold solution, hand colored, framed in the whether case, different people performed each of these tasks and brady's studio had as many as 25 employees. the person who took the photograph was not brady himself but was called an operator. the man who operated the camera. brady owned and ran the business, hired the workers, made all the aesthetic and technical choices, greeted his sitters especially the famous ones and escorted them to a position in front of the camera, putting them at their ease and setting the photo. he was a lot like bradley in this bookstore actually. earlier in his career he decided to specialize in images of well-known people. he spent a lot of time in pursuit of that. the daguerreotypes made in his gallery, called it a gallery

because he would display all these pictures of famous people in a reception room. they were known as brady images. his name became his brand. he was often called brady of broadway. his product, the photographs made by his workers were known by his name. in a business context this is easy to understand. henry ford didn't assemble cars himself and yet all the cars are called for thes. in a photography context where we think of a photographer as a person behind the camera this has been less easy to understand and led to charges that brady took credit in a deceptive way for work that his employees performed. by the time the civil war began brady had been operating galleries in new york and later in washington for 17 years. is bowl had become within the first few weir's on broadway to take photographs of every import

american and almost everyone posed for his camera. he kept up with the rapid changes in technology and innovative a few. and printed on paper, and expenses. and also mass-produced photographs and stereographs and 3d photos. the most important photograph brady ever took which i don't have here because you know it so well, was the one of lincoln on the day of his famous cooper union speech in new york, the speech which made him a viable presidential candidate. lincoln was if you recall law beardless lincoln, quarters picture, wearing the suit on the train was remarkably wrinkles, his caller didn't quite fit and brady said later he tied it up

to hide his long neck. anyway, brady, the image was widely we produced -- reproduced throughout the year in the campaign, ellis traded papers, and when brady saw lincoln again after the election and before the inauguration, the cooper institute made me president. that was the only source for this quotation. and is clear the image was helpful. volunteer state militia units from the north came flooding into washington to protect the capital from what was expected to be an imminent attack by the rebels. soldiers and officers camped around the city, went to the

brady studio to have a portrait made it to mail back home and brady began to send his operatives into the field to take what amounted to studio portraits out of boris. part of brady's impulse had to do with the sense the civil war was a big subject but history would want to know about and continuation of his interest in taking pictures of famous americans. these camp like images had commercial value as stereographs trends. brady had several teams taking pictures before the war began. after bull run this practice continued and some of his men who became famous in their own right got washington gallery operator at the time was alexander gardner and timothy o'sullivan of whom i spoke with others began to work for the u.s. army. photocopying massive orders at helping topographical engineers to find appropriate spots for

camps, hospitals, bridges, serve the army, and the growing work collection. and the review in the wall street journal, and brady's people were working for the army while working for him and agree with the journalist. he was a businessman. please don't read that review. and in the spring of 1862, brady sent his men to take photographs of the sites of the first battle. and soon accompanied mcclellan's army on the peninsula's campaign where he to the number of the first seminole photographs in the war. brady sold copies of these

pictures that is men took and copied an attitude collection of photographs others had taken some of which he appropriated with permission and some of which he did not. or he did appropriate but without permission. copying photos to which he had no legitimate claim is not a practice i have any wish to defend but it was commonly done. by any means available then, brady accumulated images from the civil war and the province of many of them is not known and probably never will be. no doubt his competitors were often less happy about this than we are today and there were squabbles over who owned or who had taken what. but because brady kept the collection together and even managed to sell a large part of it to the government we have him to thank for the vast mass of the photographic record of the war that has come down to us so brady was not a photographer of the civil war. i mentioned i had other misconceptions about it after i

read a fair amount. one grew out of some of the things i had been talking about and did not come from writers desperate to make a good story out of sketchy materials of brady's life but scholars and curators of photography who knew about as much as you do now, brady rarely operated the camera himself, got credit for work taken by others and accumulated photographs that were in those instances his. there had been a story in a journal in the 1850s about his eyesight being too bad for him to operate a camera and brady's suspicious entrepreneurialism zeal, too close to comfort for that of a neighbor across broadway he had from his first studio, p.t. barnum. if brady was a huckster he was no artist. so it grew up in the 20th century a counternarrative but he was not a photographer at all. this was pretty silly but its

effects linger to this day, vast collections, curators who are reluctant to attribute photographs that are clearly is to him. some even attribute them to his studio. what i would like to do just briefly is hit on the case that brady was not only a photographer but a conscious artist, a person who did not just take pictures or oversee the taking of them but often have a real idea behind what he was doing. in the first decades of photography one of the things that intrigued people about it was it seemed like a mechanical art form, daguerreotypes were often referred to as silent paintings because the images appeared not by the hand of an artist but by the work of light passing through the mechanism of the camera. in a world increasingly under the sway of silence photography was the first objective medium of art and the first operating the camera was not an artist but

an operator. brady's first connection to the world outside rural upstate new york where he spent his childhood was a charismatic young painter named william page who was a protege of samuel morse who we cent of as the inventor of the telegraph, who was in fact all well-known portrait painter himself, he met daguerre in paris and began an experiment, began to experiment within that daguerreotype process after it had been announced. whether or not brady learned daguerreotype from morse as he sometimes claimed, he was certainly at least on the fringe of artistic circles soon after photography arrived in america. one of his few letters, his address to send you will more sun of subject of photography as that, the portrait began to take a owed a debt to portrait and a

pose as the backdrop of lighting, and by the late 1850s brady was specializing in brady imperials, large size portrait prints on salted paper that like daguerreotype had a gold watch and were often hand-painted, quite beautiful and also had photographs blown up and painted by oil painters and images of the great triumvirate that brady had painted and were in his studio for many years and he sold them to congress where they hang today, i believe at least in the collection of the senate. it turned out brady didn't quite unknown them anymore at the time he sold them to the senate but more power to him for that.

three photographs brady took 150 years ago at gettysburg speak explicitly to the question of whether photography is simply a mechanical process or whether it implies the presence of a conscious artist. between antietam and 1860's to where alexander gardner who was still working for brady took images of the dead, the famous dead of antietam that brady exhibited in his broadway gallery under that name, between anti demand gettysburg in july of 1863 gardner had left brady and set up his own studio and taken most of brady's best photographers with including timothy o'sullivan. garner was out, brady was a competitor, he got to gettysburg first just two days after the battle ended on -- he arrived in the afternoon of july 5th. brady, gardner took timothy

o'sullivan and jamie gibson who took great photographs on the peninsula, the three approach from the south on a road passing by what is famously known as the rose farm where the dead had not yet been buried. gardner and gibson had at antietam the three began taking photographs of unburied dead confederates. the three plant this spent 48 hours on the battlefield and in that time taking 6 the images, three force of which were of dead bodies or other aspects of the horrors of war. brady didn't come until a week after that and he and his men didn't start taking photographs until july 15th. by that almost all the bodies had been buried and the most visible signs of battle had been cleaned up. the battlefield was morphing back into the placid rural scene it had been only two weeks before. because the men crossed paths brady new gardener had beaten

him to the story so what was he to do? perhaps it wasn't even a question for brady. the two men had very different sensibilities. gardner's was more journalistic and brady's although he was a successful businessman in fokine's sense of the commercial was as i said more artistic. brady himself was not drawn to images of the debt or other sorts of images the showed the price of war. if you go back to the three confederate -- this was a picture brady took at gettysburg, supposedly defeated confederate soldiers about to be sent to prison camp and who knows what? probably nothing good. look at how heroic they seem. brady saw their pride and saw this quality and i have are doubt that they really were -- sorry it is so small.

they used a stereograph print. i feel like they must be spies or scouts or something. they don't look like defeated soldiers. that was more brady's sensibility. the most remarkable thing brady did at gettysburg was take a series of photographs in which he and himself appears, images in which the viewer is literally looking over his shoulder as he contemplates a now peaceful scene where the battle had raged. i am sorry brady is so small in this too. i admire politics and prose for not allowing audiovisual. this is brady in a jaunty cap, this is what i am calling the

placid rural scene. he took 36 photographs of all land brady appears in at least six of them. these photographs are far less dramatic than gardner's but i argue they are more interesting as photographs, that are clear preference to dave for the drama of gardner's photos was not matched by the people at the time they were taken. there are three images that similar to this and they all have to do at least in their captions with a damp of general john f. reynolds who was thought by many to be the best general the north had. he was up pennsylvanian and according to the great new book out about gettysburg, he really helped precipitate the battle

because he didn't want the southerners roaming around in the pennsylvania countryside. wells was indeed killed in these woods on the first day of the battle and the caption for this one accurately says there is another famous picture of brady you may have seen standing before a split rail fence. there is up pond and he is looking out in the field and it is called the weak fields in which general reynolds fell and he fell in the woods and not in the wheat field and try to explain that. he is similarly positioned in that photograph where you are looking over his back at a very beautiful scene and there is the third one, similarly composed where they're looking through a field at a barn where reynolds was supposedly taken to die, wells died instantly and was

taken somewhere else, the fog of war. to be these three photos introduced in an explicit way acumen consciousness of the violence that played out in these woods and fields. we see one or two people contemplating the placid landscapes and we know what must be on their minds, the turmoil and death that filled the scenes only days before. all photos imply the presence of a human the work, the person who points the camera but more directly perhaps than had been done in this medium brady has offered what might be called first person photography, statement that the photo is not just an object of rendering of the scene, the work of the sun but a view created in effect by an individual consciousness. for me the three reynolds photographs qualify as works of art in that they have a clear idea behind them and are executed in a way that enhances

that idea. have to buy the book to see the others. on the web site of the international archives library of congress. a year later brady was back in the field systematically taking photographs of all the major commanders in grant's union army of the potomac. sit after the disgraceful slaughter of the battle of cold harbor, wrote a book about that too you might want to check out. the only battle for which grant expressed regret for the useless waste of life. the army soon moved to the outskirts of petersburg where brady and his men followed where he took one of my favorites of all his photographs. on june 21st, 1864, he posed general robert potter, a division commander under general ambrose burnside and his staff.

that is powder in the middle of the photograph and his staff is arrayed around him. the photograph is artfully composed and is very much one of brady's studio photographs taken out of doors. even the flap of the tent at the left side of the image suggests the draperies of the studio. potter's men are arranged around a roughly by height, each of them wearing a hat and turned toward the boss while potter is have a staring directly into the lens in the middle of the competition -- composition would give breeds of dairy would be a very satisfying photographed but now he started putting himself in photographs he couldn't stop. this time we see his face.

you see brady off to the right cleaning up against the tree. he exposed himself as what he was, not the subject of a photograph but its presiding intelligence. his gaze not at the lens but bisecting of the line between the general and a camera. one of his operators likely stood beside the camera and drew out a wooden panel covering the glass negative permitting the exposure but an intriguing possibility exists that brady is operating the camera himself. in his right hand he holds something. if you can see there's a little something running down from his hand and there seems to be something kind of running back towards the camera.

probably tapping his toes. could that be a device? is that our wire or a tube running down his right leg connecting to the camera, moving a lens cover or primitive sort of shutter? probably not according to experts on cameras at the time but even if brady holds only a switch he has broken off of a tree who can view this image without knowing that its offer was not the sun, but person, well tailored audience standing to the right of the frame, and on hip, leg talked. the last image i want to show you was taken after cold harbor in 1864, similar to the powder photograph in that the union general and his staff is the subject. in the middle of the photograph

is ambrose burnside who has his legs crossed. he is the guy that potter is under. what is interesting about this image of course is the somewhat ghostly presence of, you guessed it, brady himself in a a jaunty hats. although he is not moving but simply out of focus, clear that he had been arranging the men for the composition and was returning to the camera when is operator exposed the plate. i was looking at it closely today and some of the people in the image are not quite ready for the picture to be taken it seems like. in a way it is funny, the screw up. but it does speak to brady's role in a photograph vibrating when he was present. for me it is something else. this image of mathew brady both unfair and not there because even after the years i spent with him he remains for me a ghostly presence, an important figure of his time but someone

we will never know in the hole. thank you. [applause] so if you have questions come to the mic right there. >> caught what does the be stand for? >> i think it is just an initial. there is some question how matthew is spelled. i think he was generally known as m b. brady. there were many of his images reproduced in harbor's weekly and for a while they credited it to mathew the brady. it seems if they had gotten it wrong brady would have corrected them so i am going with one tee, most people do

>> two questions. how long do they have to stay still for? >> it depended upon the light that was available, the kind of atmosphere. early on with daguerreotype, it could be many, many seconds, up to maybe a minute. there is the beautiful, beautiful photograph of henry james as a little boy with his father, very touching, his father sitting in his chair and young henry has his arm on his shoulder but at least is touching him and there is also similar in a way to the great photograph of lincoln, the most personal in a way photograph of lincoln with his son tad where lincoln is sitting in his chair holding a book and tad is dressed very much like his father and a little suit but tad is kind of touching his father too. partly because they had to steady themselves because the exposure time was so long they

had to be very still. henry james writes about having been photographed that day in brady's studio and said it was excruciating. there were all sorts of -- many of these pictures, famous picture of grand meaning against the palm tree, there always finding ways to steady themselves. >> could you mentioned about the photographs that were kind of faked like dead people that weren't dead, sharpshooters that were not sharpshooters, union officers that turned out to be brady's assistants? >> according to the great expert on civil war photography and especially photography at gettysburg there was really only one photograph where a body was moved and that was fun famous death of a rebel sharpshooter, the rifle that was put in that

photograph was not a sharpshooter's rifle so that is one problem with the photograph. and he noticed there were photographs of this dead soldier further down the hillside and he realized his body had been carried in a blanket which appears, there were two photographs of him in the den where these rocks had been, do you think was a sharpshooter's den? the way it was set up, there are small rocks piled up between big boulders. that was the one example of a body being moved. brady at gettysburg did have one of his men kind of lie down in a field but had his legs drawn up and his arms out and when the caption was something about a

dead soldier at gettysburg which is shameful and wrong it didn't seem so unpersuasive and the lot of photographers who went to gettysburg in the weeks after the battle staged pictures of living people as dead soldiers. but there are very few times when the dead were photographed during the civil war. you feel like it happened every battle but he counts seven times. there are many images, you see the dead confederate soldiers in the trenches, they don't have shoes, it is the end of the war, they have nothing. but it was rather than you think. >> you mentioned he was in business 17 years before the civil war. can you mention where he

photographed from other than new york city? >> he had several businesses in new york city, he kept moving up broadway as he became more successful land as broadway, broadway became -- moved uptown. so he had several studios in new york. he tried to open a studio in washington in 1848, 1848 or 49, 2.5 street off of pennsylvania avenue and it didn't last very long. he had a dispute with the landlord and there was so much competition. right where the museum is was kind of a photographer's row even now. brady came back and opened a studio in 1858 between 6 and seventh street.

it is one of the few buildings on pennsylvania avenue that is still around. he had the upper three floors of the building and interestingly enough when he left at in 1881 or so those floors were empty for hundred years, shows you how vibrant lower pennsylvania avenue was until the development corporation came in. >> could you talk to us about web plate negative? >> well, this is the question i was hoping not to be -- no. one of the things that is interesting about it was reading about them taking pictures at antietam and how hard it was to do, one quality, collodion was a dumb the substance they put on glass to prepare the plates but the quality and had was it was

very attractive to flyers. these guys, gibson was developing these images in and tea demand was under some sort of tend off of the back of of wagon. not only was that hot and he had to worry about sweating, flies everywhere, i could probably jabber on a little bit but i am not a great expert on the technical aspect of that, thank you. >> thanks. i am wondering what it says about brady that reynolds was able to take away so many of his operators as you say. they take away so many people. >> it is very interesting.

okay. i will try to be brief. gardner ran the washington studio and the people who were covering the civil war where working out of there. he was the guy we were working with that he was a photographer himself in more of a sense than we think of one today than brady was. brady would drop in and out from new york. gardner was also sort of a socialist from scotland. there is the feeling that he was more willing after -- when he started his studio, to give more credit to the other photographers. they do seem to be any real animosity between them after this happened. there probably wasn't a lot of love lost. because the story always goes

that brady didn't give credit to his photographer because they went off with gardner. in his sketchbook he used many photographs that were brady's he gave no credit whatsoever to brady. he was careful to give credit to gibson and gardner and his brother and all these people but high feel it is significant that gardner went out of his way not to do that because it didn't seem characteristic of him so there was some bad feeling. a lot has been made of that but probably not true but they did go. >> my follow-up, me being an opportunist. it is a question about clarence king. the story i am vaguely familiar with, the secret life of clarence king, a secret life in brooklyn, i think a book, more

recently than yours. do you have comments on it? >> there is a book called passing strange. when i was working on clarence king i got a message from -- the great library in southern california. the huntington saying there's someone else working on clarence king. would you like to be introduced? sure, what do i care? famous scholar of photography and we did this little dance and i was interested in the first part of king's life when he was doing things. she was very focused on this. king had not black wife. he was a friend of henry adams, a man around d.c. and he fell in love with this black woman and he set her up in a house in brooklyn and didn't tell his friends about her and didn't really behave very well towards

her. i was not as interested in that part of his life. and she was more interested in the other so they fit together in a way, the two books. there is no doubt that he had this wife, didn't treat her very well, didn't provide for her and her children, they had children. john hay and his heirs gave them money for some years after this king died and she later sued to say there had been a big chunk of money they never gave her, being all black woman in new york, didn't get a lot of headway on that. >> a couple of things and then a question. somebody asked how long it takes to take pictures. if you hold up that robert e. lee picture, you notice between

his legs there is a stand and he had to lean against that in order to be in place for the two to three minutes. if you put that up again you can see between his legs there is a black thing, doesn't look like it is part of the door. the studio on 7th street, the civil war photographer's group that they toward the studio and the studio has that 45 degree angle window in order to get the light and the women's black association of women -- >> national association of negro women. >> said the rooms were abandoned for a while and we took over in just the other year we went to the roof and found all these drying racks, wouldn't drying racks where matthew brady deride his place. >> how long ago did i tell you that? >> 10 or 15 years ago. had no idea what they were. he is also buried at

congressional cemetery. question, though, when he went on the field, he said he have 25 people in the studio. how many did he bring with him on for? >> probably had a couple with him when he went, at one point he says he had two wagons so he may have had two or three people. timothy o'sullivan later seems to imply that he was there and said he would have taken pictures but a shell hit our equipment. generally say seem to go out in paris. one guy would be the kind of lead guy and the other guy would do the developing and handle the equipment and they would switch sometimes. are went up to see the rooms where brady's studio had been for all those years and there was no evidence whatsoever except that window in the back

but i compare the window to george washington's acts where somebody replace the handle when the head and that is mathew brady's window and you can see it if you go up and kind of one street above i can for member across the street but you can see it. the woman who took me around said that they found all this stuff and i said where is it? we don't know. i am not sure i believe it but it is a nice story anyway. >> i was wondering about the possibility of civil war photography at the time and the years afterward or so. >> one aspect of this that interests me a lot is a question of what kind of impact these photographs of the dead had. when brady had this show in new

york, new york times wrote a moving story about how if brady has not put the dead on our doorsteps he has done something very like it. there doesn't seem to be a lot of -- there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that they sold very well. apparently -- i am not a collector. apparently there are not a lot of those images around on cars or things like that. there were never any other famous shows. even the antietam photographs, i just assume that they must have been shown in a washington gallery. gardner took them, it was gardner running the gallery. there is nothing in any of the papers, they just didn't make the kind of impact.

apparently the picture of robert anderson, the man who had been at fort sumter, sold thousands and thousands of images, the war came just as the craze happened where people are keeping cards of card sized images of members of their family, but they would sell them these big books and there were all these empty spaces so they wanted to start collecting images of generals and people like that so those sold very well too. the business end, taking photographs of soldiers, of was a robust one. they would take the skin types that were very cheap to make and very durable. there is one report there were up to 300 photographers following the army of the

potomac at various times taking these pictures of soldiers and their would-be bags, mailbags full of tintypes, these young men would have their pictures taken and send them home and two weeks later they would spend another dollar and see how their beard would grow so there was a good business in that. that is the response to your question. thanks. >> we have time for one more person. >> the pressure is on. you mentioned how little information was available about brady and also what was there wasn't necessarily accurate or reliable. talk a little bit about reporting the research process on this and kind of how you walk around those issues. >> this is sort of just like tell you about my life for the

last seven years basically. it is interesting to me. i am not a trained historian. i feel what was interesting to me was to get at a point where i knew the material well enough, felt i knew brady well enough that i could make decisions. as a magazine editor we have pieces fact checked for our magazine and the number of times we do a lot of different fact, they are conflicting, we decide what is going to be the fact. history is full of those sorts of decisions. it is a process of certainly comparing accounts, getting all the hard facts i could but often times a matter of instinct, one of my friends who read the books that you always went for the

simplest explanation which is the good way to go. but it was -- that was the challenge, really. so have a read and see how i did. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send as an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or ten us at twitter.com/booktv. >> the book tells us for. it tells a story of a nuclear weapons accident in damascus, arkansas that occurred in 1880 and i use that story, that narrative as a way of looking at the management of our nuclear weapons since the first nuclear device was invented in 1945. i hope to remind readers that

these weapons are out there, that they are still capable of being used and that there is probably no more important thing that our government does than manage them because these are the most dangerous machines ever built. the subject has fallen off the radar quite a bit since the end of the cold war. >> use use words you do not want to hear together, nuclear-weapons and accidental detonation. eric chaucer on command and control sunday night at 9:00 on afterwards, part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. also this month booktv ads online book club is reading this town, get involved, post your comments 24/7 on face book and twitter. this fall booktv is marking our 15 anniversary. this weekend we look at our fourth year of broadcasting, 2002. two of the top-selling

nonfiction books focus on the september 11th terrorist attacks. investigative journalist bob woodward's report on decisions made by the bush administration following september 11th, bush at war. and former new york city mayor rudy giuliani reflect on his experiences during the out math -- aftermath of the attacks on world trade center in leadership. >> a chapter in the book that is entitled weddings are discretionary, funerals are necessary. that was a lesson my father taught me. my father used to say to me people don't need you at their wedding. is a big joyous occasion but everybody goes to a wedding so if you can't go to the wedding, a okay. but you better go to the funeral because that is when people really need you. people really need to feel that there are a lot of people sharing their loss. that is a person they lost that

is truly important and it reaffirms the importance in that person's life and the importance of the person who left behind, their love for that person. we wrote that before september 11th and we wrote that out of the context of the experience of all the funerals and wakes that i went to as mayor of the city of new york for police officers and firefighters and rescue workers and people who work for the city. i never realized the importance of that lesson or the magnitude of it until after the events of september 11th. >> keep watching booktv as we look at our first fifteen years on c-span2 auld this fall. >> calvinist nina great deal to montana, largest industry from

livestock, raising livestock, being a huge part of that. . to this day you still need a man or a woman or young person that can get on a horse, take care of the livestock. ..