Tea at Trianon: Civil War Photos in Color

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 12, 2014

Civil War Photos in Color

Three Confederate Prisoners

From Business Insider:

Color photography may not have been widely used until the 1930s, but that hasn’t stopped an active group of Redditors from looking to change the past. On the Colorized History Subreddit, Redditors use photo manipulation to add color to historical black-and-white images.

Two of the most prolific users, Mads Dahl Madsen and Jordan J. Lloyd (who has since started Dynachrome, a digital image restoration agency), have done US history a favor by taking a number of the Civil War photographs available at the Library of Congress and turning them into realistic and beautiful looking color.

As photography was not invented until the 1820s, the Civil War was one of the first wars to bephotographed. Famous photographers such as Mathew Brady and his apprentice Alexander Gardner made it their duty to capture the country’s tragic war for posterity, with a variety of portraits of officers and soldiers and scenes of daily life and the aftermath of battles. At the time, cameras were not able to accurately capture motion, so there are few, if any, photos of actual battles in action. (Read more.)