GMHS Library Home Page: Military History/Local History

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

This online collection provides access to about 7,000 different views and portraits made during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and its immediate aftermath.

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is comprised of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

Articles, biographies, descriptions of battles and maps from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and the War of 1812.

A chronology of the major battles of the American Civil War. Many of the sites include links to detailed battle maps by the Civil War Trust, which works to preserve endangered battlefields.

This page offers beginners in Civil War research a suggested step by step process for exploring resources. Since this page is aimed at genealogical researchers, subjects are framed as "ancestors," but these strategies may be used to research any soldier of the era.

This brief article from Ancestry.com offers some insight on how to read handwriting on primary documents.

This link goes to a category of blog posts from Fishwrap, the official blog of Newspapers.com. There are several articles offering ways to get started, and what to do if you're stuck.