the 1850s, and and while he was running a studio he had on lower broadway in manhattan, and timothy o. sullivangrew up there. as i read about o. sullivan i realize there really was not a first rate book about mathew brady which really astonished me given his importance. i think all of us to care at all about history know the name of mathew brady. and increasingly in the last couple of years have become aware of his old grass as we've gone through the 150th anniversary of the civil war. the year since i first started thinking about doing this have been a lesson really how little i knew about brady when i started out. and then how little i knew was accurate even after i spent about a year reading about him, doing research to write the proposal for the book. it should have struck me given the industry of scholars and journalists like myself, bradley, that if there wasn't a good book about mathew brady, there might be a reason. [laughter] the truth is that there are two good reasons. one is that for a man who is in the public eye for half a century whose name became a brand both for portrait photog