Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines: Important and Rare Periodicals from Confederate, Union, Abolitionist, and British Presses is the definitive online Civil War media resource.
The database contains 65,000 pages drawn from 49 periodicals, including 15 campaign newspapers, most of them illustrated — 3,720 issues published from 1860 to 1865. Originally printed in 16 different cities, many of the publications are now rare and hard to find, with an item sometimes extant only in a single archive. Carefully sought out and compiled from 17 different museum, library, and private collections, including those of the American Antiquarian Society and the Chicago Historical Society, these resources are now available to modern scholars in electronic form for the first time here.
The 49 publications that comprise Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines present four viewpoints — Union, Confederate, Abolitionist, and British. Every page has been scanned at high resolution and the content re-keyed, making the issues fully searchable, either individually or in any combination. Search by year, group of years, or topic — or browse each publication from issue to issue through the years, as did readers of the time. The database also contains a sample selection of 600 letters from Alexander Street’s The American Civil War Letters and Diaries — 300 Union and 300 Confederate.
Users of Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines can follow the election of Lincoln in 1860, the subsequent course of the Civil War from Fort Sumter through Appomattox, Lincoln’s re-election in 1864, his assassination in 1865, and the beginning of Reconstruction under President Andrew Johnson. Today’s readers can authentically and realistically experience the week-to-week results of the war, as did the newspaper audiences of the time — through the articles as well as all the illustrations, cartoons, and maps that brought the visual aspects of the war home as events unfolded.
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