In 1895, the same year as Edison's and the Lumière brothers’ early film exhibitions, Stephen Crane, a 22-year-old bohemian New Yorker – a man who had never witnessed combat in his life – published The Red Badge of Courage. The novel was heralded as a graphic and compelling account of the United States Civil War, told through the eyes of a young Union private and based largely on accounts from veterans, historians, and a popular postwar anthology, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, a collection of essays and personal diary entries from both Union and Confederate veterans.1 Crane's novel, the story of Union private Henry Fleming's soldiering life, narrates the Civil War in first person and is informed by the emotive capacity and authoritativeness of first-person accounts of soldiers who fought the war. First-person testimonials, preserved in the letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers, evoked in Crane's novel, serve as competing histories to the ones written by historians and journalists. These competing histories can be read as counter-histories – alternative accounts that challenge the work of war journalists and even pictorial accounts – on the basis that a firsthand account serves as a more authoritative narrative of events.

More than a century later, in an early scene in Saving Private Ryan, General Marshall, while ordering the mission to find the missing James Ryan, reads aloud ‘The Bixby Letter’, words of condolences written by Abraham Lincoln to bereaved mother Lydia Bixby: