Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that historian Benson J. Lossing did more than any other man to make history interesting and popular. Lossing wrote his comprehensive three-volume history of the Civil War at a time when the facts were still fresh. Originally published in 1868, Volume Three covers the period from midsummer 1863 to the war's end in the spring of 1865. Lossing accompanies his narratives of marches, battles, and sieges with maps and plans, includes biographical sketches of the prominent people from both sides of the conflict, and illustrates his history with hundreds of drawings and engravings by the author and others.