Research Seminar on United States: Civil War Era

Reproduced in books/ebooks

The Library collects publications that collect and gather reprinted sources on a topic. You can search Omni and limit to these. 

• e.g., United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 personal narratives
• sources, interviews, personal narratives, statistics, diaries, correspondence, biography, etc. (more headings)

Subscription collections

The Library subscribes to many primary source collections comprised of digitized archival content. For this course, some of the relevant databases include:

• Accessible Archives
  • Access to diverse primary source materials reflecting broad views across American history and culture. Eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records have been assembled into comprehensive collections from leading books, newspapers and periodicals.
• American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
  • Contains over 2,000 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of diaries, letters and memoirs.
• American Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America Histories and Cultur
  • Contains primary and secondary documents such as artwork, speeches, petitions, diaries, journals, correspondence, early linguistic and ethnographic accounts, photographs, maps, rare books and newspapers, ranging from the 16th to the 20th century.
• Black Women in America
  • Encyclopedia that provides detailed coverage of the achievements and contributions of African American women.
• Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement and Colonial Encounters
  • Includes business and financial documents, correspondence, government documents, artwork, and diaries, from 1650-1920.
• Medical Services and Warfare
  • Includes sources that tells the story of medical advances during warfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the influenza epidemic in 1918, including the U.S. Civil War
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
  • Contarins over 2,000 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
• North American Indian Thought and Culture
  • Contains over 100,000 pages of text and images, including biographies, autobiographies, diaries, letters, personal narratives and speeches.
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries
  • Provides access to scanned pages of the diaries and letters from hundreds of women in North America.
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
  • Includes documents and collections covering an extensive time period, between 1490 and 2007, from libraries and archives across the UK and North America.
• Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775-2000
  • Includes the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made.

Newspapers

• Indigenous Newspapers in North America
  • Contains nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. With newspapers representing a huge variety in publisher, audience and era
• Globe and Mail
  • 1844 to three years ago
• New York Times
  • 1851 to three years ago

Periodicals (Journals, Magazines)

• American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection
  • Periodicals from 1691 through 1877, covering many aspects of American life during this time period, such as agriculture, entertainment, politics, literature, fashion, and family life.
• JSTOR
  • All journal content is from volume 1 issue 1, on a wide range of topics.

Original and reprints

• Internet Archive
  • can be difficult to find, easier if you already know a title or author
  • e.g., print book in Omni | digitized book in IA

Digitized

Hundreds of websites offer insight into the American Civil War through digitized collections of primary source material. This list is not comprehensive, but includes a sampling of digitized newspaper archives, collections of letters and diaries, digitized photographs, maps, and official records and dispatches from the battlefields.

• Library of Congress Digital Collections
  • Abraham Lincoln Papers
  • African-American Experience in Ohio
  • African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818–1907
  • Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project
  • A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation
  • Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs
  • Selected Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress
  • Washington during the Civil War: The Diary of Horatio Nelson Taft
  • Wm. Oland Bourne Papers
• Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
• Alabama Civil War Newspapers
• Civil War Letters of the Christie Family (Minnesota Historical Society)
• Civil War on the Western Border (Kansas City Public Library)
• Civil War Washington
• Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
• Michigan in the Civil War: A Guide to the Resources in the Bentley Historical Library 
• Pennsylvania Civil War Era Newspaper Collection (Penn State)
• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (Cornell University)
• Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony (Patricia Click, University of Virginia)
• The Calvin Shedd Papers: The Civil War in Florida (University of Miami)
• Thomas Jackson Letters
• Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture (University of Virginia)
• The Valley of the Shadow (University of Virginia)
• The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Cornell University)
• Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875 (Indiana University)

• African American Women Authors of the Civil War Era
• Civil War Regimental Histories: A Guide to Finding Unit Information
• Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Minorities in the United States Civil War
• U.S. Civil War: Selected Resources at the Library of Congress