A KALEIDOSCOPE OF WAR

ENTERING THE NEW AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MUSEUM at the historic Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Va., the first thing you notice is the color. Here are large photographs of familiar and unfamiliar faces—Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, enslaved workers in a field, a Native American soldier, and others—covering the walls leading to the museum’s permanent exhibit. Unlike the black-and-white images we’re used to, these portraits have been colorized. We see different shades of skin, tired faces with crow’s feet and dark circles, and the blues, greens, and browns of eyes. Instantly, these once-distant personages become more lifelike and three-dimensional, as if they could be one of us, and that’s entirely the point.

The result of the 2013 merger between the Museum of the Confederacy and the American Civil War