SVBF Civil War Roundtable

The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation’s Civil War Roundtable meets every other month, on the second Thursday of the month, at the Shenandoah Valley Civil War Museum in Winchester (20 N. Loudoun St.).

Next meeting:  Thursday, February 7, 2019, at 7pm.  Guest speaker:  Author Stephen Recker.  Stephen’s topic will be “Rare Images of Antietam.”

Membership is the roundtable is open to everyone.  To be added to the e-mail list for the group, click the button below or call the SVBF at 540-740-4545.  For more information, call 540-740-4545 or email info@svbf.net.

About the Presentation:

Soon after Alexander Gardner’s photographic wagons left the blood-strewn Antietam Battlefield, local photographers began taking images on the field. While much has been written about Gardner’s ‘death studies,’ little is known about these other early images. Our speaker, Stephen Recker, has found over 600 of them, many unknown and unseen, including some exciting recent finds, and will use them to show how the battle happened and how the battlefield has changed over the years. In his talk, Recker will also discuss his efforts to collect, catalog, and interpret photographs of the Maryland Campaign of 1862 sites in his book Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them.

About the Speaker:

Stephen Recker is a collector of rare Antietam photographs and relics. Items from his collection can be seen on battlefield waysides, in the newly renovated museum at Antietam National Battlefield, as well as in his book Rare Images of Antietam, and the Photographers Who Took Them. Recker is a member of Antietam Battlefield Guides, a service he founded in partnership with WMIA, the non-profit at Antietam National Battlefield. He produced Virtual Gettysburg, a critically acclaimed interactive Civil War battlefield tour; Antietam Artifacts, a CD-ROM with images of rare postcards from the Maryland Campaign of 1862; and www.virtualantietam.com, and recently edited and published Shadowing Grant: Reminiscences of the United States Hospital Transport Services in the Civil War 1864-65. He began his professional career as a lead guitarist, recording and touring with Al Stewart, the Spencer Davis Group, Mary Wells, and Tommy Chong, and as technician for Ringo Starr, Kiss, Diana Ross, and Madonna. In multimedia, he produced for Apple Computer, Adobe, and the Smithsonian, and was named a “Top 100 Producer” by AV Multimedia Producer Magazine. He is currently a Senior Associate – Drupal Developer at ICF International in Fairfax, Virginia, where he has worked on web sites for the White House (ONDCP), The Department of Defense (ATF), and others. Recker is a graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music and lives with his family in Maryland.