I only thought one thing when you played the clips of those "threatening" to leave the union - - PLEASE GO. These right wing tax naysayers pay far less in taxes than they recoup - mainly from the creative and productive toil of the big cities full of the liberals they love to deride . Let them create their own tax free, gun-filled confederacy and we'll keep our "socialist" society -- and our tax dollars.

I liked the story on Matthew Brady when I heard it. A radio ad for the program, however, set it up as though Matthew Brady had put the guns in the hands of the soldiers in the contrived photograph. The program explains that it was someone who worked with Brady, not Brady himself, so the ad was a bit misleading, and not every listener gets to hear the whole program.

Fascinating program all around. One thing I wanted to add: Kurt mentions that with Matthew Brady it was as if Avedon had gone to cover Vietnam – and (maybe everyone knows this already) Avedon actually did go to Vietnam as a photojournalist.

Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner always gets a bad rap for arranging things (bodies, props) in his photos. That is anachronistic thinking. After the development of high-speed film and modern photojournalism, we got the idea that "pictures don't lie" and it is wrong to stage a photograph. In Gardner's time, photography was just developing as an art, and looked back to painting - including the idea of composition. In the same segment, Winslow Homer was praised for how he composed his Civil War sketches. If you think of Gardner as trying to convey the larger truth of what a battlefield is like (like Homer), rather than documenting the exact details as he found them, I believe you will have a greater appreciation of what Gardner was trying to do.