Although the term was coined at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, time capsules date back to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when autographs, photographs, and other artifacts were sealed in various cities as tributes to the bourgeois elite. These memorial safes and chests, while related to cornerstone deposits, were inspired by new concerns about the proliferation and decay of paper records, the inadequacy of monuments, and the specter of class apocalypse. But amid mounting labor unrest, they proved contentious, provoking widespread criticism and inspiring fictional reappropriations by authors including Mark Twain and the socialist George Allan England.

Following the Civil War, the wealthy plantation owner Adelicia Acklen redecorated her villa, Belmont, near Nashville, Tennessee, with white marble ideal sculptures by the American sculptors Randolph Rogers, Chauncey Ives, Joseph Mozier, and William Rinehart. During the war, Acklen had compromised her reputation as a genteel Southern lady by bargaining with Union officers in order to sell her cotton at exorbitant wartime rates. By purchasing and displaying a collection of statues that embodied the ideal of true womanhood, Acklen hoped to publicly redomesticate both her home and herself and to express her affinity for the ideology of the Lost Cause.

Close collaboration enables an art historian and paper conservator to attribute a hitherto-unknown Civil War drawing of Berdan Sharpshooters at Yorktown to Winslow Homer. Contrasts between this drawing and other Homer illustrations for Harper’s Weekly during the Yorktown Campaign of 1862 shed new light on the issue of wartime censorship. The drawing’s relationship to other Civil War work by Homer, in particular his first oil, Sharpshooter (1863), and a much later sketch illustrating the artist-correspondent’s perception of sharpshooters at Yorktown as murderers, also shows as never before the profound effect of this wartime experience on his work.