LibGuides: American Civil War &amp; Reconstruction: Links about the Civil War

Links About the Civil War

Abraham Lincoln Association
See Abraham Lincoln Publications
The American Civil War
Overview, battles, Civil War leaders
American Civil War (The History Channel) This site includes an extensive gallery of clips from History Channel’s Civil War documentaries, photographs, topic overviews, an interactive map of Sherman’s march, and an interactive graphical overview of the war. Topics include: technology, women, espionage, medicine, biographies of important people, and discussions of important battles.
Britain and the American Civil War
British Library.
The Civil War
U.S. National Parks Service.
The Civil War (A Film by Ken Burns – PBS companion web site)
ncludes images of the Civil War, maps of key battles, biographies, and historical documents.
The Civil War: 150 Years (National Park Service Sesquicentennial Celebration)
Includes overviews and primary sources, as well as links to the web sites of over 70 parks and battlegrounds in the National Park System, which also have resources related to the history of the Civil War.
Civil War on the Western Border
The Missouri-Kansas Conflict 1854-65. Essays, Maps, Timeline, Image Gallery, Lesson Plans
Civil War Philadelphia & Its Countryside
Civil War Research & Commemoration
U.S. Army Center of Military History
Civil War Washington Civil War Washington examines the U.S. national capital from multiple perspectives as a case study of social, political, cultural, and medical/scientific transitions provoked or accelerated by the Civil War.
EDSITE's Civil War Page The National Endowment for the Humanities EDSITEment website has over 33 lessons on the causes, the course and the consequences of the Civil War. Each lesson is written by a history or government teacher and is built around critical analysis of primary sources including documents, speeches, images and photographs drawn from vetted websites.
Intelligence in the Civil War
A publication of the Central Intelligence Agency. Though much has been written about the Civil War itself, little has been written about the spy war that went on within.
Jews in the Civil War
Jewish American History Foundation
Lincoln/Net Northern Illinois University Digital Library. HISTORICAL THEMES: African-American Experience and American Racial Attitudes Economic Development and Labor Frontier Settlement Law and Society Native American Relations Politics Religion and Culture Women's Experience and Gender Roles LINCOLN BIOGRAPHY:: About Lincoln's Biography Boyhood and Migration, 1809-1830 Indian Fighting and Politics in New Salem, 1831-1836 Springfield, the Law, and the Whig Party, 1837-1843 Congress and the Mexican War, 1844-1849 Return to the Law, 1850-1853 The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1854-1856 Debating Douglas on the National Stage, 1857-1858 The Campaign of the Century, 1859-1861
One Life: The Mask of Lincoln
National Portrait Gallery. Introduction
The Rise of Lincoln
The Civil War
Lincoln's Contemporaries
The Underground Railroad
National Geographic Society. During the era of slavery, the Underground Railroad was a network of routes, places, and people that helped enslaved people in the American South escape to the North.
Visual Culture of the Civil War
American Social History Project, Center for Media & Learning.
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The historical record of the American Civil War includes a vast amount of visual material—photographs, illustrated news periodicals, comic publications, individually-published prints, almanacs, political cartoons, illustrated envelopes, trade cards, greeting cards, sheet music covers, money, and more. The era’s visual media heralded an unprecedented change in the production and availability of pictorial media in everyday life and an innovation in the documentation of warfare. In the last decade, a remarkable amount of these materials, previously confined to libraries, historical societies, and museums, has become available on the Web, and in the last generation drawn the attention of humanities scholars.

Library of Congress Links About the Civil War

The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress
African-American Perspectives A panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost 100 years from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love.
African American History Online: A Resource Guide A large number of primary source collection materials related to African American history are digitized and available online via the Library of Congress's website, including manuscripts, newspaper articles, images, and rare books. In addition, the Library also provides digital content on African American history through their exhibition program, "Today in History" essays, and online research guides.
The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana This collection brings together more than 10,000 newspapers, broadsides, prints, cartoons, campaign tickets, scrapbooks, and personal items related to the 14th president.
America Singing: 19th-Century Song Sheets For most of the 19th century, before the advent of phonograph and radio technologies, Americans learned the latest songs from printed song sheets. Song sheets are an early example of a mass medium and today they offer a unique perspective on the political, social, and economic life of the time, especially during the Civil War.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 This collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.
Century of Lawmaking: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875
Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention
Journals of Congress
Debates of Congress
Statutes and Documents
Civil War Maps
Civil War Photographs
Civil War Resources from the Library of Congress The online collections of the Library of Congress offer rich resources for the study of the Civil War. Within the collections are maps, images, documents, and sound recordings that help define this time and this experience.
A Civil War Soldier in the Wild Cat Regiment This online presentation includes correspondence, photographs, and other materials dating between 1861 and 1865 that document the Civil War experience of Captain Tilton C. Reynolds, a member of the 105th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers.
The Clara Barton Papers Clara Barton was a philanthropist, nurse, educator, and lecturer. This collection includes correspondence, diaries, reports, legal and financial papers, organizational records, lectures, writings, scrapbooks, printed matter, memorabilia, and other papers relating to Barton's work providing relief services during the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War.
Congressional Globe The Globe, as it is usually called, contains the congressional debates of the 23rd through 42nd Congresses (1833-73). There are forty-six volumes in the series based on the table found in the Third Edition of Checklist of United States Public Documents 1789-1909, Volume 1B (pp. 1466-69).
Daguerreotypes More than 725 photographs dating from 1839 to 1864. Portrait daguerreotypes produced by the Mathew Brady studio make up the majority of the collection.
From Slavery to Freedom 1824-1909 397 pamphlets published from 1824 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to organizational reports and legislative speeches.
The Hotchkiss Map Collection Contains cartographic items made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss (1828-1899), a topographic engineer in the Confederate Army.
Photographs of African Americans During the Civil War
Prints and Photographs Reading Room

More Primary Sources

The 19th Century World HarpWeekly. Includes information and cartoons from Harper’s Weekly on the Civil War in general, as well as on Slavery and Black America from 1857-1874, the Ku Klux Klan hearings, and the Reconstruction.
About Jefferson Davis
Rice University. The Papers of Jefferson Davis.
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
American Battlefield Trust.
Civil War
American Battlefield Trust. Battles, Overview, FAQs
Civil War Documents
Internet Archive. Overwhelming collection of sources.
Confederate State of America: Documents at the Avalon Project
Yale Law Scool
Diary of a Civil War Nurse
Smithsonian Museum
Documenting the American South U of North Carolina. Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
The Emancipation Proclamation
National Archives. View the 5 pages as handwritten and a Transcript of the Proclamation.
Eyewitness to the American Civil War Great resource. Includes firsthand accounts of John Brown's raid, the assassination of President Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, Sherman's March and many other important events. Also includes a Georgia plantation owner's diary that provides insight into life in the South immediately following the defeat of the Confederacy.
Making of America (MOA) Project - Cornell University
Primary sources covering the antebellum through reconstruction periods of US History.
Modern History Sourcebooks: The Civil War
Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University
Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library
Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War Details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown's Raid through the era of Reconstruction
War Times Journal: American Civil War Excerpts from the memoirs of General U.S. Grant, General John Gordon, General John B. Hood, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, as well as orders, telegrams and reports from the navies of the United and Confederate States.