Each contributor uses a seemingly unusual story, incident, or phenomenon to cast new light on the nature of the war itself. Collectively the essays remind us that war is always about damage, even at its most heroic and even when certain people and things deserve to be damaged. Here, in short, is war.

Stephen Berry is associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is the author of" House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War" and "All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South" and the editor of "Princes of Cotton: Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848-1860" (Georgia).