Harvard University’s Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930, which is available through their Open Collections Program, is a great resource that offers interesting primary sources that one cannot easily find elsewhere. This collection offers a wide range of material, including photographs, manuscripts, and books and pamphlets. While the focus is on immigration between 1789 and 1930, there is plenty of information on issues related to the Civil War era. One can browse the collection by theme (including “Immigration, Railroads, and the West” and “Gold Rush”) and topic (including Attitudes Towards Immigrants, Living Conditions, Reasons for Immigration, Working Conditions). Also check out their map collection and links to other digital resources on this subject.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library, a public library in Baltimore, Maryland, has a number of great digital collections available. While a few have materials related to the Civil War era, one particularly interesting collection is of broadsides published during the 19th century. Over 100 broadsides are available, including a number from the Civil War. As Maryland was a border state, the collection contains broadsides from both Union and Confederate supporters. Not all of these broadsides are related to politics. Other topics include love songs and temperance songs.

The Duke University libraries have several digital collections available on their websites. One of these is the American Song Sheets collection, which contains around 1800 song sheets, all from the 19th century. It was customary during the 19th century for publishers to print just the lyrics of popular songs on a single sheet, usually illustrated with a drawing. These became known as song sheets, handbills, or broadsides. The illustrations and the lyrics to these songs provide an insight into popular themes of the time. The collection contains a lot of broadsides from the South and the Civil War era in particular, so it can be useful for understanding homefront morale during the war or for studying the larger context of the 19th century. There are two options for searching the collection: by keyword on the main page or by using the index that allows the user to search the text of the song lyrics. For those interested in the music to accompany the words, there is also a searchable database of sheet music.

While my last post was on House Divided’s “zoomable” maps , we also have almost all of the maps from Mitchell’s 1857 atlas available. This includes all the US states and territories as well as countries and major cities from around the world. For example, check out the maps of Africa, Asia, Australia, the Carribean, Europe, England, Jerusalem, London, the Middle East, and South America. These maps can help students see how those in the 19th century saw the world that they lived in.

As this is Geography Awareness Week, I thought I would highlight some of the zoomable maps available on House Divided. Some of these maps provide bird-eyes view of various towns and cities – including Alton, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Harrisburg, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Washington D.C. In the Springfield map, you can look for Abraham Lincoln’s house (# 29 on the map). Other maps provide nice overviews of coastlines, such as Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Virginia. House Divided also has zoomable maps of battlefields, including several of Gettysburg. Click on “Zoomify” at the top right of a map in House Divided in order to view it as a zoomable map.

The University of Virginia Library has an old exhibit on Southern women in the Civil War that is still accessible online.  This exhibit is very well organized into categories that represent major concerns that occupied women on the home front before, during, and after the war.  Under each category, the narrative is presented using a variety of primary sources.  Most of the sources are letters and diaries, which are summarized using important excerpts.   Some sections also make use of photographs or popular cards of the time.  The originals of all of the primary sources are  available as a scanned image on the website.  The format of the exhibit is straight-forward and easy to understand, and it tells the story of women during this time period in a concise and very effective way.  It would be easy for teachers to present one or more of these topics to a classroom using the primary documents selected here as a resource.

The history department at the University of Nebraska has a number of lectures on digital history projects available, including Edward Ayers’ “Civil War and Emancipation: Visualizing American History.” Ayers, who developed the Valley of the Shadow, discusses that project as well as the Emancipation Project and the Southern History Database. While a transcript is not available, Ayers also presents his ideas in a short essay, “Mapping Freedom.” Digital history projects like the Valley of the Shadow allow historians to “bore down to the stories of individual people and families and, as Ayers explains, in this case “see how people held in bondage created new lives for themselves.” Also be sure to check out the interviews with other historians who share their thoughts on digital history.

The New York Times recently published a review of two new exhibits on John Brown – one from the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond and another from the New York Historical Society. (The New York Historical Society’s exhibit draws on material from the Gilder Lehrman Institute and some of it is online, as I noted in previous post). Both exhibits may tell a similar story, but they have different perspectives on Brown. Edward Rothstein explains that the New York exhibit “suggests” that “Brown’s legacy…finally found fruition in the 1960s civil rights movement.” As for the Richmond exhibit, the focus is Brown’s decision to sue violence as a means to end slavery. “We hear the clamor of the debate more clearly” as Rothstein notes that this exhibit asks visitors to consider whether “an individual [has] the right to carry out violent acts based on conscience.” While different views on Brown are not surprising, it is interesting to see them reflected in exhibits open at the same time.

The New York Historical Society recently opened “Lincoln and New York,” a new exhibit that aims to “fully trace the evolution of Lincoln’s relationship” with the state. The exhibit includes not only Lincoln’s visits to New York, such as for his Cooper Union address in February 1860, but also explores the impact of his administration’s policies during the Civil War. In addition, the material on display highlights the extent of serious political opposition that Lincoln could face even in northern states. “We see New York’s version of the Civil War being fought using words, ideas, images and, at least during the 1863 Draft Riots, a fair amount of blood, with Lincoln as the battles’ nexus,” as the New York Times’ Edward Rothstein explains in his review. If you can’t make it to the exhibit (which runs through March 25, 2010), be sure to check out their interactive exhibit online.