Take a moment to visit one of my favorite online resources: “The Southern Homefront 1861-1865,” launched by the University of North Carolina as part of its “Documenting the American South” site. The project addresses an information gap. “The military side of the Southern bid for political independence,” explained UNC Professor of History William L. Barney, “is far better known than its domestic counterpart.” There was a wealth of material on battles, but a dearth of sources to show how commanders’ decisions and soldiers’ actions influenced families at home. And how did the actions and thoughts of those at home affect soldiers? If war and politics are, as Carl von Clausewitz claimed, perpetually intertwined, so too are the battlefront and the home front, especially in democracies.
The site showcases materials from the Chapel Hill campus’ North Carolina, Rare Books, and Southern Historical Collections as well as six sources from Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Together they offer more than 400 digitized contemporary works and more than 1,000 images of maps, letters, diaries, broadsides, currency and more. What does that entail? Have you ever tried to make sense of conscription in a nation created, in part, to protest perceived abuses of federal authority? You can find accounts of Rebels wrestling with that issue, too, along with debates over the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Are you trying to engage students with stories about children their age? You can find letters from and about children, and textbooks showing how Rebels tried to educate the wartime generation.
If you’ve never visited this site before, you may want to begin with the topics page at http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/ topics.html), or you can search collections alphabetically.
Originally published in the August 2012 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
