Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written a study of the erotica and pornography that 19th-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.