Primary Sources: U.S. Civil War

"The Confederate Broadside Poetry Collection at Wake Forest University consists of over 250 examples of poems written by Southerners and Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. The collection includes some pamphlets and clippings, as well as broadsides.Scanned images of all items in the collection are available on this website. Click on a letter at left to see an alphabetical listing of titles. Select a poem by clicking on the title and then click on the highlighted Link field in the catalog record to see the scanned image."

"... a website devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, her writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work." The site includes a mixture of resources, some of which are freely available and some for which there is a fee for access due to copyright restrictions. The site includes the following areas: Writings by the Dickinson Family - "Please contact the editors concerning access to restricted areas of these sites." Responses to Dickinson's Writing, Teaching with the Archives, and Critical Resources.

"includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924. This collection was originally based on Dr. Robert Bain's bibliography of the hundred most important southern literary works and continues to expand under the guidance of scholarly advisors Dr. Joseph M. Flora and Dr. William L. Andrews. This collection begins with some of the earliest texts about America written by British discoverers that set the foundation for American letters and traces the development of southern literature through to the beginning of the twentieth century."
Documenting the American South

v.1-2 1863-1864

"... is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers." The site provides access to a variety of materials for studying Whitman and his works.

A collection from the University of Wisconsin related to the band music of 1st Brigade Band of Brodhead, Wisconsin.

"The Civil War Era Sheet Music collection contains nearly 35 different pieces of sheet music. Crandall numbers are indicated if they were referenced in Marjorie Lyle Crandall's book, Confederate Imprints: A Check List Based Principally on the Collection of the Boston Athenæum (1955)."

"These thirteen authentic maritime songs from the era of the American Civil War (1861-65) intone the story of war on the water. "

"... consists of over 2500 pieces culled from the Library's collections. The collection is limited to music about the war and therefore does not include every piece of sheet music published during the war. In addition to the music, many of the covers are worth noting. They treat a variety of subjects ranging from conventional portraits of generals to battlefield scenes to the popular image of Jefferson Davis escaping in petticoats."
The Library of Congress

"The short-lived Confederacy produced more than 7,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, maps, pieces of sheet music, pictures, and periodicals. All of the publications produced in Confederate states not held by Union forces are known as Confederate imprints. The printed music included songbooks, sheet music, and broadside ballads. Songsters, inexpensive collections of secular song lyrics, were not a popular book genre in the south until after the Civil War began. However, Confederate publishers put out more songsters during the four years of war than they had during the preceding four decades. The lyrics held within the songsters, many of which were patriotic, helped to keep up southern morale. soldiers comprised much of the audience for morale-boosting publications such as songsters. "
Provided by the University of Alabama.

Download the original lyrics and transcripts of songs about John Brown. The site also provides an analysis of the work.

Located in the Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University, the collection contains over 29,000 pieces of music and focuses on popular American music spanning the period 1780 to 1960. Pieces are indexed on this site; a search will retrieve a catalog description of the pieces. An image of the cover and each page of music will also be retrieved if the music was published before 1923 and is in the public domain.

"On September 27, 1974, the Music Division of the Library of Congress re-created a typical concert of brass band and vocal music from mid-nineteenth-century America. That concert has become the starting-point for Band Music from the Civil War Era, an online collection that brings together musical scores, recordings, photographs, and essays documenting an important but insufficiently explored part of the American musical past."

"The Becker Archive contains approximately 650 hitherto unexhibited and undocumented drawings by Joseph Becker and his colleagues, nineteenth-century artists who worked as artist-reporters for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly observing, drawing, and sending back for publication images of the Civil War, the construction of the railroads, the laying of the transatlantic cable in Ireland, the Chinese in the West, the Indian wars, the Chicago fire, and numerous other aspects of nineteenth-century American culture. These “first-hand” drawings, most of which were never published, document in lively and specific ways key developments in the history of America as it struggled to establish its national identity. "
Boston College

"Alfred Waud was recognized as the best of the Civil War sketch artists who drew the war for the nation's pictorial press. " This site from the Library of Congress provides images of several of his prints.

"The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library concentrating on American society and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Free and open to the public, the Library Company houses an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art. Our mission is to foster scholarship in and increase public understanding of American history before 1900 by preserving and interpreting the valuable materials in our care. The Library Company connects with thousands of visitors annually, ensuring that the lessons of the past will continue to amaze, instruct, and inspire future generations. We serve a diverse constituency throughout Philadelphia and the nation, offering comprehensive reader services, an internationally renowned fellowship program, online catalogs, and regular exhibitions and public programs."