Goodreads asked Steve Procko:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Steve Procko My latest book, "Captured Freedom," came from the sharing of the photograph of twelve ragged men taken on 1/2/1865 by one of their descendants. It sent me on a journey that required a lot of detective work. I wanted to know each of their stories.

Though the photograph can be found in many institutions across the United States, including the National Archives and Library of Congress, the story of the men had been lost to history and in some cases mixed up with the history of others.

Now their little-known true story can finally be told.

I got the idea for my first book, "Rebel Correspondent," while researching a Civil War story for a documentary I am working on.

I came across the 120 year old writings of a cavalry private named Arba F. Shaw that was published in his local paper over three years in 55 articles. Then it was all but forgotten.

Twenty years before Shaw wrote his account of life as a cavalry soldier, another soldier, the 1st Tennessee's Infantry Regiment's Samuel Rush Watkins (1839-1901) wrote his account of his experiences in the Civil War. The Columbian Herald newspaper in Columbia, Tennessee, serialized Watkins' writings from 1881 to 1882, then published the account as a critically acclaimed book, Co. Aytch: Maury Grays First Tennessee Regiment or A Side Show of the Big Show, in late 1882. They predominately featured Watkins' eyewitness accounts in Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Civil War.

When I found Shaw's articles, and finding them all required a bit of a scavenger hunt because a few that missing, I knew this was something historically significant.

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