150 years ago today...

As storied and entrenched in history firma as the Civil War now stands, it's hard to believe it was ever just "happening."

Somehow, these epochal events seem now so compartmentalized that it's difficult to imagine what it must have been like as they were unfolding, as everyday news, trickling down to the masses in a secondhand manner. No radio, no television, certainly no internet, and many Americans too poor or illiterate to lay witness to the tales of the day. Instead, word-of-mouth accounts, hearsay, or public readings from newspapers kept a populace appraised of the daily mire; accounts, mind you, which relied heavily on weary carriers or the sporadic telegram, and as such lagged days - if not weeks - and often well after the dust had settled and history had turned, as it did so often on the whim of the weather or the resolve of a beleaguered brigade or two.

The American well-to-do followed events in lavishly illustrated newspaper magazines like the one pictured above, bearing a date one hundred fifty years to the day.

While the battles at Gettysburg and Antietam justly echo in the annals of our history, the gallant exploits of Captain William E. Strong of the Second Wisconsin Volunteers survive only in obscurity - surviving in great part to the coverage afforded here, in the September 28, 1861 edition of Harper's Weekly.