The American Civil War took place in the United States from 1861 to 1865 after seven southern slave states announced their secession from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The Civil War is considered the bloodiest war in American history, responsible for the deaths of more than 620,000 soldiers (Civil War Preservation Trust, 2013). One thing that sets the Civil War apart from all other major conflicts that preceded it is the use of photography throughout the war. Advances in photography during the war forever changed the way the public viewed war and the military. Although the Mexican-American War was actually the first war photographed, very few photos were taken and most of them were never made public (Covkin, 2012). In contrast, the Civil War was the first major conflict to be widely photographed. Before the Civil War, only 5,000 photographs had been taken in the United States. However, the four years of civil war resulted in more than a million photographs being taken. It was also the first time that photographs of the actual battlefield were taken, and technological advances in photography allowed these images to be widely distributed and sold throughout the country as they circulated in magazines, newspapers and galleries. For the first time in history, citizens on the home front could witness the carnage and destruction of distant battlefields. Before the technological advances made in photography just before the Civil War, photographs took up to 8 hours to develop. However, with the development of wet plate photography, a process in which an image is captured on pieces of glass coated with a chemical coating, the time required to process a...... middle of paper... ...ople that they capture continues to exist through the images. Photos provide visual evidence of past events. The development of photography and the wide distribution of photographs during the Civil War opened public eyes for the first time to the savage nature of war, but also to the enormous sacrifices made by soldiers. As the demand for photographs increased, a large industry arose that greatly increased the media presence and effectiveness for each war or conflict that followed. The American public today has been able to collect and study photographs from the Civil War, learning an important lesson about what photographs say about the nature of war and how the media sometimes hides part of the truth. Civil War photography forever changed the public's perception of the war and showed that war-related media should be approached with caution..