The Becker Collection is a great digital project from Boston College that contains over 600 drawings by Joseph Becker and others who worked for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. The “Featured Images” slideshow provides a nice introduction to what is available in the collection. These drawings cover a range of Civil War related topics, such as [...]

HarpWeek has an online collection of political cartoons from 14 presidential elections between the years 1860-1912.  These cartoons provide a visual insight into the climate surrounding the Election of 1860, and its core issues.  Some of the cartoons require a lot of prior historical knowledge, while others can be understood with some basic analysis.  HarpWeek [...]

“John Bull & Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British-American Relations” is an interesting exhibit of selected items from the British Library in London and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The site is organized around several themes, such as “Exploration and Settlement,” “Common Language, Separate Voices,” “From Abolition to Equal Rights,” and “Popular Culture: [...]

Among the many websites and digital projects bringing the 19th century to the World Wide Web is the Lincoln Archives Digital Project from researcher Karen Needles. This ambitious project began in 2002 with the goal of digitizing all federal records from the Lincoln administration, including every cabinet and every agency. The project is the first of [...]

Two websites currently stand out for the access they provide to primary sources about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868.  The first from Douglas O. Linder’s quite exceptional “Famous Trials” series.  Linder, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) has put together invaluable primary source packets on trials from Socrates to [...]

The Civil War was not without political wrangling and electioneering. 1860-1865 saw two presidential elections, a number of congressional elections, and a great many local elections. Politics carried on, despite the war. The press is a great resource for viewing the politics of the era. Certainly not sources for cool, fact-based analysis and commentary, Civil [...]

History Now has a great website on Lincoln under its “Interactive History” section. It contains a collection of images from the 1800′s as well as several political cartoons from the time period. What is also great is that each image has a paragraph or two describing the relevance of the image. It is definately worth [...]