I got a treat last week when I read a little blurb in the Library of Congress blog about the recently digitized Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings. This set contains more than 1,600 eyewitness sketches made during the US Civil War. I don’t have a direct URL for you, but go to http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/mdbquery.html and start your search with Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings.
That’ll give you 1655 results, from “The Veteran” to “Death of Reynolds — Gettysburg.” Each search result listed the date of the drawing and the artist; if you want to get fewer details but see thumbnails of the images click on the “Preview Images.”
Images have their own detail pages, which includes information about the medium of the drawing, any copyright restrictions, and additional notes. There’s a slightly larger version of the image as well. Click on that and you will not get an even larger image, but you will get the option to download archival quality versions of the images. Note: some of these images are pretty huge; the TIFF version of an 1864 snowball fight sketch I downloaded weighed in at over 125 MB.
If you’re looking for something specific, just add keywords to that initial “Morgan Collection” search — it’ll narrow down your results a lot. I added battle to the initial phrase and got 556 drawings.
Civil War history buffs, don’t miss it, especially if you liked the images from the Becker Collection. And don’t miss the links for the larger image downloads.
Footnote.com has announced a new addition to its Vietnam War Collection: Army Photos and Unit Service Awards. As you may know Footnote.com is usually a subscription service but the company is making its Vietnam War collection free for the month of February. You can access it at http://go.footnote.com/vietnam/.
The Army Photos are directly available at http://www.footnote.com/documents/241910021/photos_vietnam_war_army/. There are almost 29,000 images available here and at this writing the collection is denoted as “76% complete.” The first page has lists of recent comments and “discoveries” that have been made, but there’s also a search box. I did a search for patrol and got 400 results. You can also browse items via 31 categories (from aerials to vehicles.)
The Army Unit Service Awards cover documents related to Presidential Unit Citations, Valorous Unit Awards, and Meritorious Unit Commendations. The documents cover duties of service, duties performed, and letters of recommendation, and are available at http://www.footnote.com/documents/241893090/vietnam_unit_service_awards/. You can browse these items if you like (they’re organized by unit) and you can also do a keyword search. Remember these are unit citations, and not individual citations. You can get more information on unit citations at http://www.homeofheroes.com/medals/ribbons/1_ribbons_unit.html.
As long as you’re here, you might want to check out some of the other materials relating to the Footnote.com Vietnam War collection, including Marine Corps photos (almost 20,000) and an interactive version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where you can leave a tribute to one of the people listed on the wall, or provide other information (like a picture.)
The Harvard Law School Library announced earlier this week the release of the Maurice Ettinghausen collection of Ruhleben civilian internment camp papers, 1914-1937. An overview of the collection is available at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=law00029.
The papers were produced when the German government established an internment camp at a horse racetrack outside of Berlin to incarcerate male foreign civilians, with most of the materials dating from 1914 to 1918. Most of those interned were British, though there were other nationalities. You can view the digitized papers by going to http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/12382737 — the materials are divided into boxes which are further divided into topical folders. The content of the folders is not usually personal material — instead it’s things like notices, playbills, tobacco cards, newspapers, etc. If you’re interested in hand-lettered signage and general randomness don’t miss the Canteen Committee Announcements, Box 4, Folder 2.
There are also images available with this collection. You can get to them by searching for Ruhleben in Harvard’s VIA system. I did just that and got 371 hits, which included pictures of the theatre productions, camp buildings, groups and societies formed within the Ruhleben camp, and so forth.
Seeing the kind of societal bonds that developed when a bunch of people were thrown into a camp is fascinating. Especially the things like newspapers, camp notices, etc. I could spend a lot of time browsing the printed material. Kudos to Harvard for digitizing this collection, which they have had for over 75 years.
