This story appears in the May 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. At the time of the Civil War, camera shutters were too slow to record movement sharply. Celebrated photographers such as ...

a brazen billion-dollar art theft; a gutsy woman who tricked the Nazis into releasing thousands of Polish prisoners; the ominous day-by-day countdown to the opening shots of the Civil War ...

Archival images of 16,000 photographs, taken from a total of 1 million pictures of the Civil War, along with period paintings, lithographs, and headlines, were combined with moving newsreel ...