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Civil War on the Internet
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Tom Ledoux
I started out with the word “war,” which returned over 96 million pages; “peace,” on the other hand, only returned 28.5 million pages. What does that tell you about the world? If you just search for the words “civil war,” you will find more than eight million pages! “Virginia ‘Civil War’” returns 2,300,000 pages, “American Civil War” nets you 702,000 pages, the “Battle of Gettysburg,” 58,000 pages, the “War Between The States,” 48,000 pages; And, the “War of the Rebellion,” 34,500 pages and a search for the “War of Northern Aggression” delivers links to almost 6,000 pages. If you just search on the dates “1861-1865” you get 190,000 pages. There are 510,000 pages on the Civil War Navy alone! The Internet has been called the “Information Highway” and, like a real highway, there are twists and turns, confusing intersections, potholes and black ice! One of the biggest frustrations you will have in surfing the Internet is the phrase “Under Construction.” Just as macadamized highways need maintenance, new roads are constantly being built, and you can’t get to the same destination the same way twice because of detours, the Internet is forever experiencing growth spurts that defy even the experts from being able to say “The Internet has XXX billion pages (or is it trillions?), and XX million users.” By the time they say it, the numbers are already out of date. Navigating the Web can take you from a portal (a Website considered as an entry point to other Websites on a particular subject, in our case, the Civil War), to a broad subject like the Peninsula Campaign, to a specific battle, say Malvern Hill, to Mahone’s Brigade, to a narrative by Pvt. George S. Bernard, 12th Virginia Infantry, who initially thought adjoining units had taken the hill without firing a weapon, “but I was terribly mistaken,” he said. (“Joel Craig’s Bivouac,” www.valstar.net/~jcraig/index.htm Navigating the Web can also get you in trouble! The first time I went searching for cemeteries in Vermont, using the search terms “Vermont cemetery,” the first hit displayed a nude woman stretched out on the hood of a fire-engine-red convertible. (There was a cemetery in the background.) Ouch! Aside from finding things you were not expecting to find, you also run the risk of finding material that initially looks great, and you want to use it, but you can’t find the source of the material. Caveat Emptor! Let The Buyer, or, in this case, The Reader, Beware. Publishing material on the Internet is almost a no-brainer, and in many cases there are no constraints on subject matter, no editorial review, no accountability. You will also find people using copyrighted information without acknowledgement. Buying Books Perhaps reading small print on a screen isn’t really your thing. If you’d rather spend a rainy afternoon perusing a real book instead, but have unique tastes in reading material, you can still use the Internet to get that hardcover tome. Let’s look for Richard West’s Mr. Lincoln’s Navy, published in 1957. You probably won’t find it in a local bookstore or a local branch of your town library. Finding it in a used bookstore is a hit or miss proposition as well. Sure, you can get it on inter-library loan, but it takes a while to get to you, you can only keep it for a few weeks, and if you didn’t find the time to read it just then, you have lost the opportunity. Why not try buying your rare and out-of-print books on the Internet? There are literally thousands of opportunities for buying books on the Internet, but I will only list a few. Today (Oct. 8), Amazon, www.amazon.com, didn’t have it in stock, but they have a used book section, and have five copies of it, ranging in price from $11 to $42. Barnes and Noble, www.bn.com, doesn’t have it in stock either, but they have a more extensive used book section, with 50 copies of the book, ranging in price from $3 to $58. Powell’s, a huge independent bookstore in Portland, Ore., www.powells.com, has one copy of it, used, for $45. New York City's legendary Strand Book Store, with 18 miles of books, www.strandbooks.com, has three copies, at $12.50 each. And finally, the Advanced Book Exchange, a network of thousands of used and antiquarian booksellers at www.abebooks.com, has 62 copies, ranging from $3 to $55. In conclusion, if you aren’t a confirmed bookworm, there are many benefits to be had by using the Internet. In subsequent issues we are going to try to help you navigate through the mass of information available, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, finding the information you are looking for, and validating it. We will discuss tools and strategies that will get you to where you want to go. We will discuss the war in general, campaigns, battles and people. We’ll try to steer you towards the best sites, and warn you about some of the not-so-good sites.
Tom Ledoux, a 26-year Navy veteran, lives in Ellicott City, Md. He has an M.A. (Civil War Studies) from American Military University in Manassas, Va., and is the recipient of the Vermont Civil War Council’s 2001 Full Duty Award for his Website, “Vermont in the Civil War,” www.vermontcivilwar.org
Tom Ledoux
December 2004 What is a primary source? According to the dictionary, it is "firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation." These sources can include books, serials, government documents, manuscripts, maps and artifacts. Last issue we talked about books, the real kind with hard covers. They are great, if you can afford them. I have a fair number of them, some originals, some reprints, but the really fundamental sources are way out of my league, pricewise. Reprints of the Official Records are available for sale, but they cost several thousand dollars. Maybe you can afford that, but it's a budget-buster for me. So what is the next best thing to an original document? A digital copy of it, a picture of the original. There are dozens of digital projects popping up all over the Internet, but all are not created equal. Many claim to be digital projects, but are actually textual transcriptions of originals. Some are very good, but they aren't the originals, so transcription errors could creep in. Several real digital projects stand out from all the rest, particularly in relation to our interest, the Civil War. The "Making of America" project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is "a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction." It is currently hosted at two sites, the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Michigan's version of the project currently includes 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th-century imprints. Cornell's version provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th-century imprints. Included among these are the 128 volumes of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880-1901), and the 30 volumes of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894-1922). These two alone can save you $4,700, or several trips to a library. Cornell's project also includes the following magazines or journals that were published during the war: The Atlantic Monthly, The Continental Monthly, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, The Living Age, The North American Review, The Old Guard, Putnam's Monthly, and Scientific American. Michigan's list is way too long to include here, it is massive! You can find Michigan's collection at www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp and Cornell's project at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa. The U.S. Army Military History Institute has digital versions of Dyer's Compendium of the War of Rebellion, Heitman's Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army (1903), and Livermore's Numbers and Losses in the Civil War, available online. See http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usamhi/DL/chron.htm. Check out their massive Civil War photographs collection too, at http://carlisle-www. The Library of Congress's "American Memory" project is a massive undertaking. It includes the Abraham Lincoln Papers, Civil War maps, several photograph collections (including the Mathew Brady collection), and a variety of other Civil War collections. See http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html. "The Diary of Horatio Nelson Taft, 1861-1865" presents three manuscript volumes that document daily life in Washington, D. C., through the eyes of a Patent Office employee. This is also on the "American Memory" website. The Digital Library of Georgia, http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu, includes diaries, city reports, photographs, letters, etc., in both digital and transcribed format. Louisiana Digital Library Collections Online, http://louisdl.louislibraries.org, contains sections on the antebellum period and Reconstruction. Their "America at War" collection "chronicles the military history of the United State..." The majority of the collection concentrates on the War of 1812 and the Civil War. An index to Bates's History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-1865, is available at the Pennsylvania State Archives, www.digitalarchives.state.pa.us/archive.asp. "The Valley of the Shadow, Two Communities in the Civil War," at <http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu, has a great number of digitized documents. Over 3,000 pages of rosters, plus letters and other manuscripts form the basis of the Wisconsin Historical Society's digital collection online at www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/collections/digital.asp. Take a look also at "Wisconsin Goes to War," www.uwosh.edu/archives/civilwar/civilwar.html. Duke University's online resources on women in the Civil War, at http: //scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/women/cwdocs.html is also a great resource. Virginia Tech's digital archives, http://spec.lib.vt.edu/civwar, contains a number of manuscripts and links to related sites. Check out "How to Find Civil War and Digital Resources" at www.people.virginia.edu/~er6n/civil_war.html for additional links. What else do you need? How about newspapers? The University of Michigan has the 1865 issues of Harper's Weekly online, www.hti.umich.edu/h/harpersweekly, and promises more to come. The Brooklyn Eagle, from 1841 to 1902, is online at www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle. There are other projects in the works as well, which will be discussed at a later date. This is by no stretch of the imagination the extent of digital archives available online. There are a number of commercial sites available, but I have not included them because they are fee-based. Many of the above provide links to other sites, or you can start your search at a state's archives, major universities and large libraries. Happy hunting! In our next issue, we are going to discuss resources on the Civil War Navy, a subject near and dear to my heart.
Tom Ledoux, a 26-year Navy veteran, lives in Ellicott City, Md. He has an M.A. (Civil War Studies) from American Military University in Manassas, Va., and is the recipient of the Vermont Civil War Council's 2001 "Full Duty Award" for his website, "Vermont in the Civil War," www.vermontcivilwar.org.
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