Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, this book evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, Honore Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among others.

In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and artists' struggles to interpret their surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, "Art in an Age of Civil Struggle" makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.