The American Civil War:

Links to External Resources

Information about the Civil War is available through countless websites, of differing emphasis, quality, and ideological perspective, and it would be impossible to list all of them. The following sites—all supported by educational institutions, non-profit organizations, or the U.S. government—represent, in this editor’s view, the most reliable, comprehensive, and politically neutral repositories of primary materials currently available online.

Library of Congress: Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861–1877: www.loc.gov/topics/content.php?subcat=8; This is the portal to the Library of Congress’s many digital repositories of Civil War-era materials. Sections include “Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861–1877,” “Abraham Lincoln” “Civil War” and “Slavery and Abolition,” and the extensive holdings range from sheet music to Frederic Douglass’s manuscripts, Confederate maps to contemporary periodicals.

Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs Division: www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/civwar; The Library of Congress makes publicly available a vast repository of images relating to the Civil War, in different media: glass negatives and related prints; ambrotype and tintype portraits; eyewitness drawings from the Civil War; stereograph cards; and illustrations from pictorial newspapers such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

Library of Congress: Selected Civil War Photographs: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html; This collection—an excellent starting place for exploring the Civil War as it appeared in American photography—includes more than 1,100 images, searchable by keyword or subject. The photographs depict battlefields, military personnel, camp scenes, and many portraits of both officers and enlisted soldiers.

The Civil War Trust: www.civilwar.org; Along with a miscellany of primary sources and educational resources, this website is particularly strong on information regarding battlefields and land preservation. It is maintained by the Civil War Trust, a non-profit organization focused on preserving important Civil War sites.

National Archives Military Records: www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war; Along with the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives is one of the nation’s central repositories of Civil War documents. In addition to information on how to research both Union and Confederate personnel records, the site provides digital copies of many primary sources, including maps, correspondence, official records, and photographs.

National Park Service: The Civil War: http://www.nps.gov/civilwar; This site features excellent short articles on virtually every aspect of the war, including its cultural, religious, economic, medical, and civilian dimensions. Users can also explore the various physical locations of the war which have become monuments, parks, or historic sites: battlefields, forts, schools, personal residences, and more. Also houses the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS), a searchable database about those who fought in the war, including regimental service, burial locations, medals of honor, and imprisonment.

The Valley of the Shadow: http://valley.lib.virginia.edu; “The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.”

Civil War Washington: www.civilwardc.org; “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. The project draws on the methods of many fields—literary studies, history, geography, computer-aided mapping—to create a digital resource that chronicles the war's impact on the city.”

Documenting the American South: www.docsouth.unc.edu; This project, maintained by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, comprises a set of extensive scholarly databases of primary sources, including “The Southern Homefront, 1861–1865.” Others are also indirectly connected to the Civil War: “First-Person Narratives of the American South”; “Library of Southern Literature”; and “North American Slave Narratives.”

African American Civil War Museum: www.afroamcivilwar.org; “The mission of the African American Civil War Museum is to preserve and tell the stories of the United States Colored Troops and African American involvement in the American Civil War. We utilize a rich collection of primary resources, educational programming and technology to create a meaningful learning experience focused on this pivotal time in American history.”

Official Records of the War of the Rebellion: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/records/; This site, a project of The Ohio State University, features a searchable, digitized, full-text version of the 127-volume The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. This vast compendium of eyewitness accounts, correspondence, orders, reports, and maps, originally published between 1881 and 1901, represents one of the country’s most important sources of raw information about the Civil War.

Causes of the Civil War: civilwarcauses.org; A repository of primary documents from the years leading up to the war and from the secession crisis itself: speeches, newspaper editorials, pamphlets, religious tracts, party platforms, declarations of secession, and more.

University of Virginia Electronic Text Center: http://etext.virginia.edu/civilwar/; This site provides both full-text transcriptions and images of original documents for a wide variety of Civil War-era writings, including soldiers’ letters, essays, and fiction.

Healing the Nation: www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/about/exhibition/healingthenation.html; The medical aspects of the Civil War are presented in this online exhibition prepared by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.