Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Volume VIII - For the Year 1864

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1864. Hardcover. Good. Folio measuring 11.5" x 16". iv, 848pp. Issues 366-418 of Harper's Weekly with an "Index to Illustrations" and "General Index" bound into three quarter green leather ruled in gilt, purple cloth over boards, and embossed bands and title on the spine. Pages age-toned with light dampstains and musty odor, front board detached and present, boards dampstained and scuffed, extremities worn and chipped, a good only copy. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Volume VIII - For the Year 1864 including dozens of illustrated lithographs by Winslow Homer mostly centered around the Civil War. A complete edition of Harper's Weekly for the entire year of 1864. Much of the year being centered on the end of the Civil War with hundreds of lithographs illustrated by Winslow Homer. Homer was a landscape painter and commercial printmaker considered to be one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America. His illustrations in this edition of Harper's Weekly are highly detailed renditions of actual soldiers and their living situations, as well as events, battlefield scenes, and war maps sometimes taking up full pages or centerfolds. Before the war Harper's Weekly was moderate leaning and one of the more widely read journals at the time but during the Civil War the paper changed to fully support Lincoln and the Union; which can be seen by the number of lithographs focused on escaped slaves and Union soldiers and their experiences during their war. A particular lithograph depicts African-American Union soldiers freeing other African-American slaves. In this edition George William Curtis, a founding member of the Republican Party, was the political editor of the journal. Notable writers in this edition include Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Benson John Lossing, William Parker Snow, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, John Stevens Cabot Abbott and many more. A complete and rare copy of the entire year of 1864 for Harper's Weekly.