Robert Bonner begins this wonderful and engaging narrative with a nod to contemporary debates over the symbolism and meaning of the Confederate battle flag. “In the 1990s,” he notes, “rebel flags became front-page news” as civil right organizations “worked to discredit a symbol they associated with slavery and racism” while heritage groups defended the flag “as a proud relic handed down from heroic ancestors” (p. 1). Bonner emphasizes in his introduction, however, that readers of Colors & Blood should not expect rumination on these contemporary debates. Instead, he has fashioned a fascinating study that explores how a series of Confederate banners and flags evolved out of and, in turn, shaped a “wartime flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War . . . and brought together powerful themes of defiance, sovereignty, and bloodshed” (2). Although this wartime flag culture existed in the North as well as in the South, Colors & Blood focuses almost entirely on the Confederacy.