Where can you look if you think you’ve run out of information about a person or place? How can we encourage students to be persistent researching in the face of a “dead end”? And how do we equip students with the knowledge of databases and archives, so that when they run into a historical dead end, they know where to keep looking?
My hope is that my work to create source materials on Civil War nurses situates nurses in the heart of the Civil War and proves their importance in the growing war historiography.
When I was conducting research for the Library of Congress primary source set "Civil War Photographs: New Technologies and New Uses," I learned way more about photographic technologies that were used before the Civil War than I could fit into the brief teacher's guide.
One of the Library's primary source sets for educators, Civil War Music, has recently been re-tuned to reflect the central role that music played in the Civil War, with the addition of more than a dozen items from the Library's collections.
A photograph of the abolitionist and suffrage activist Sojourner Truth that appears in the Library's newest Primary Source Set for educators, "Civil War Images: Depictions of African Americans in the War Effort," provides an opportunity to discover the questions that the objects in a portrait can raise about the message that image might have been meant to convey.
“Civil War Images: Depictions of African Americans in the War Effort,” explores the myriad ways in which African Americans who participated in the Civil War were portrayed visually.
I first stumbled across an image of Tom Wiggins when looking for images of African Americans during the Civil War, but I didn’t pay much attention to him until two days later when I saw the same piece of sheet music displayed at the National Portrait Gallery.