Americas Collections Blog

Civil War Project: Maps - Birds Eye View of the Seat of War (Prang, 1861)

Maps 71495 (69) Birds Eye View of the Seat of War, arranged after the latest surveys (Prang: Boston & London, 1861)

Some more US Civil War materials have been added to the website today, including one of the print and map publisher, Louis Prang's more interesting efforts.  To access the maps, visit www.bl.uk/manuscripts and enter [maps] in the Manuscripts search box.  The system was designed to be used to display Greek Manuscripts, which accounts for some of the current design and UX choices.

 

[MJS]

Civil War Project: The Great Seal of the Republic Redux

(The Great Seal of the Republic, shown on the British Library digitised manuscripts website)

You may recall an earlier post about the Confederate Seal of the Republic, which was supplied to the Southern States by a British firm ("That symbol - the Great Seal of the infant Confederacy - sent to it by its nurse, England").  Well, we've now added it to the Library's digital items site: Digitised Manuscripts, which lets you explore the seal's case, provenance and zoom in on the seal itself.  More to follow.

[MJS]

 

A Hankering to Travel: Charles Dickens and North America

Portrait of Charles Dickens from J. Forster's 'The Life of Charles Dickens' (shelfmark: YA.1993.a.5369)

The British Library's Folio Gallery has a new exhibition up, 'A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural'. The exhibition has been put on to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens, who was born on the 7th February 1812, and is well worth a look. While I paid the exhibition a visit the other day it reminded me of some of Dickens' writings, which I had been meaning to read for some time, the notes on his travels to North America in 1842.

 'American Notes for General Circulation' is a travelogue resulting from Dickens' travels and experiences in America and Canada, the Library holds a copy at shelfmark, Cup.410.g.25. The account is well worth a read for the author's flair and as an interesting travelogue in its own right. What caught my attention was Dickens' devotion of the final thematic chapter to the topic of slavery in America. Dickens is strongly critical of the practice and goes to great lengths to illustrate the horrors of slavery through the reproduction of adverts regarding run away slaves.

Dickens is withering in his criticism of Republicans who maintain a system at odds with their stated values, denouncing these individuals as thinking they, 'will not tolerate a man above [them]: and of those below, none must approach too near' (p. 41). He also notes there to be a significant proportion of this group who would, 'glady involve America in a war, civil, or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery' (ibid). While the causes of the later civil war are complex such a statement does seem unnervingly prescient.

Even though the Library's 'A Hankering After Ghosts' led me to call up Dickens' 'American Notes' this chapter caught my attention for another reason, the Americas department's collaborative doctoral award on slavery in Canada. The award is currently open to applications and anyone who is interested can find more information on this previous post.

[PJH]

Civil War Project Update: from rifles to TIFF files

I can recall seeing adverts for 'Winchester' drives in the 1980s, at a time when the humble tape-recorder provided the common means of saving computer data.  According to Wikipedia, in 1973 IBM had introduced their 3340 Drive, offering commercially for the first time many of the technologies that became standard for future drives (e.g., 'low mass and low load head with lubricated platters').  The drive was designed around two 30 megabyte spindles, causing the project lead, Ken Haughton, to name the machine 'Winchester' after the famous (or, given its violent purpose, infamous) Winchester 30-30 rifle - a gun designed in 1894 by the same firm that manufactured the Henry Rifle during the Civil War: 'that damned Yankee rifle that they load on Sunday and shoot all week!' (also used by the Confederate President Davies' personal security guards).

More peacefully - and more prosaically - the portable hard drive shown above is now being used to ferry giant TIFF files from the Library's scanning studio to my computer, where I am starting to relabel them with the relevant shelfmark and folio (using something called Ant Renamer), and send them on their way to www.bl.uk/manuscripts, making sure that the match up to their catalogue entries and are transformed into 'DeepZoom' .dzi files.

[MJS]

Civil War Project: the Emancipation Proclamation

Happy Thanksgiving. As a holiday treat, here's a link to the Library's copy of the Leland-Boker Authorized Edition of the Emancipation Proclamation (1864), recently released as part of our US Civil War digitisation project.  The signatures at the foot are in the hands of Abraham Lincoln, John Nicolay (Private Secretary to the President) and William Seward (Secretary of State).

There's more about the Proclamation on our Americas Collections Highlights pages, and it's available on Images Online.  The Smithsonian also provides an introduction.

[MJS]

Printing Money

Confederate States of America, Fifty dollar bill, Add. MS. 44511, f. 23.

The last few weeks (well, years, if truth be told) have been a crash course in economics.  Thanks to the news, 'bonds', 'quantitative easing', 'sovereign debt', and the rest, have a more common... currency. 

The American Civil War, like most conflicts, was also a financial clash, in which the Treasuries of the two sides constituted one further weapons of war.  In the South, a new system of currency was issued, often with the promise that the Confederate States of America would pay the bearer after the cessation of hostilities.   Around $1.7 billion in confederate dollars was issued. Widespread counterfeiting and inflation soon made such notes near worthless, and the rise in the worth of gold led to rumours of stashes of Southern bullion, stories that continue to this day.

Above is an example of a fifty dollar bill, from the Library's manuscript collections.   Once the images and catalogue data has been processed, it should join other Civil War materials on manuscripts.bl.uk.

• Chase, Philip Hartley, Confederate Treasury Notes. The paper money of the Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 [A catalogue. With illustrations.] (Philip H. Chase: Philadelphia, 1947)
• Criswell, Grover C., Comprehensive catalog of Confederate paper money(Port Clinton, Ohio: BNR Press, 1996)
• Slabaugh, Arlie R, Confederate States paper money(Iola: Krause Publications, 1993)
• Tremmel, George B., Counterfeit currency of the Confederate States of America (Jefferson, N.C.; London: McFarland & Co, 2003)

[Matthew Shaw]

The American Civil War in the Round (Digitisation Project Update I)

 

As I've mentioned before, thanks to the generosity of the American Trust for the British Library, we have been able to embark on a digitisation and online exhibition project for the Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War.  The focus of the work, as well as helping to develop the Library's digitisation processes and platforms, is to reveal to a broader audience the collection items that tell the history of the British role in the War.  More than a cameo, the fortunes of the British Empire (not least many thousands, if not millions, who were born British or Irish) was closely tied to the course and outcomes of the war.  As well as the geo-political implications, there was also the matter of international trade - and, often, the the supply of goods (and other support) to the Confederate South.   This included the printing of stamps for the South, and we hope to include an image of the die used by a British firm for this purpose.

The image shown above, however, is the electrotype of the seal of the Confederate States of America (Seals XLIV.229), dating from 1864 (or, rather, an image of its image being processed on my desktop).  While two-dimensional digital images are fine for most purposes, and especially so for texts, objects such as these lose more than most in the process of being reproduced for an online world.  So, borrowing some of the techniques picked up during the curation of the Growing Knowledge exhibition, we were able to try a method of rendering objects in what appears to be 3D, known as Polynomial Texture Mapping.  A team from Southampton University kindly came to try out their 'PTM' dome, which records a series of images with light cast from various angles.  These are combined into a single file, which can then be manipulated online, giving the effect of a torch being shone on a 3D surface, casting shadows, highlights and different shades.  Inscriptions and erasures may be able to be seen more easily, and the artefact looks much more realistic.

There are problems, however - not least reflections from metal objects, such as the electroplated seal.  So, Southampton was keen to see what can be done with post processing.  I now have the files, and am in the process of rendering the complete PTM file, and working out how to include the viewer in the online gallery for the Civil War project when it finally goes live.

[MJS]

Moby Dick on Horseback

Yesterday (1 August) was the 192nd anniversary of birth the author of fishy tales, Herman Melville.  Perhaps in unwitting honour, the BBC showed Major Dundee on Sunday afternoon.  One of Sam Peckinpah's revisionist westerns, with a fascination with the themes of male friendship, hatred and violence, it casts Charlton Heston as a Union Cavalry officer, forced to draft in Confederate prisoners in a campaign against an Apache raiding party.  Critics have neatly mapped the main characters onto those of Meville's Moby Dick, and the not-entirely satisfactory story tells the tale of the consequences of an obsessive idealistic captain on his 'crew' as they head into the watery part of the world, or, in the film's case, the deserts of Texas and New Mexico.

Read more in John L. Simons & Robert Merrill, Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns (2011).

[Matthew Shaw]

In Memory of the Patriots who Fell: Manassas and the Bull Run

On 21 July 1861, around 62,000 men faced each other near the key railway junction at Manassas, a vital point on the route to the Confederate capital of Richmond.  30,000 of them were Union troops under General Irwin McDowell, most of whom were 90-day volunteers; the 32,000 other were Confederates under the generalship of Pierre G.T. Beauregard.  Both sides thought the day would be decisive and swift.  It was neither.  The Union forces, under the gaze of sightseers from Washington, watching on a nearby hill, were mostly routed by the Confederate troops who then failed to capitalise on their success and press on to Washington.  A year later, between 28 August and 1 September, 48,000 Confederates faced 75,000 Union troops at the Second Battle of Manassas, forcing a Union retreat.  The war, of course, continued for another three and a half years. 

The National Park Service has published an online account, and today hosts an re-enactment of the battle (there are worries about the heat, much as in the disastrous 1961 re-enactment).  Visitors will not be able to visit the nearby Disney history theme park, as it was not built in 1994.  An earlier form of commemoration can be seen above (consecrated 11 June 1865).

For more about the preservation of the battlefield site, see Joan M. Zenzen, Battling for Manassas: the fifty-year preservation struggle at Manassas National Battle Field Park (Penn State University Press, 1998; online book).  On the memory of the Civil War more generally, see William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: contesting the memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: race, memory and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).  For an account of the battle, including the antics of the Times correspondent, William H. Russell, see Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire.

And for online materials, UEA's Containing Multitudes blog contains a well-curated list.

 [Matthew Shaw]



Aeluyd f'Ewythr Robert, or Uncle Robert's Hearth: Uncle Tom in Translation

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly, undoubtedly the most influential novel in American, and perhaps even world, history.

The New York Times carried a pithy piece on Beecher Stowe as the 'unlikely fomenter of wars' by David S. Reynolds (Graduate Center of the City University of New York).  It comes recommended.  Rather than 'an old-fashioned, rather lachrymose affair that features the deaths of an obsequious enslaved black man and his blond, angelic child-friend, Little Eva' we should see Uncle Tom as vital fuel to the antislavery cause, and not just in the U.S.: 'In Russia it influenced the 1861 emancipation of the serfs and later inspired Vladimir Lenin, who recalled it as his favorite book in childhood. It was the first American novel to be translated and published in China, and it fueled antislavery causes in Cuba and Brazil.'  And it had profound influence on the Civil Rights movement.

As it happened, I stumbled across Uncle Tom while I was trying out an online resource.  A letter from Thomas Watts, assistant keeper in the British Museum in the nineteenth century, to a bookseller was published in the  Massachusetts newspaper, The Independent (and was followed up in the Boston Liberator).  The letter is reproduced in full in the excellent Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture(UVA).

Watts spotted the importance of Uncle Tom, which was translated into 'so many languages, and among them into so many obscure ones, languages into which it has been found so hard on many occasions for popularity to penetrate.  Even the master-pieces of Scott and Dickens have never been translated into Welsh, while the American novel has forced its way in various shapes into the language of the ancient Britons.'  He proposed to the head of the printed book department, Anthony Panizzi, that he collect as many editions and translations as possible, in order to be of service to students of language and philology.  The plan was put into action, as the Museum's holdings served as a model for the Boston Public Library, and no doubt elsewhere. 

Watts finished his letter: 'I regret that my account of these versions should be so much less extended than I had hoped to make it, but especially at this period of the year the duties of an officer of the British Museum render it almost impossible for him to make any use of whatever of the treasures committed to his keeping, which are, as a rule, as closed to him as they are open to the public.'

I wonder what he would have made of this wealth of online treasure?

[MJS}

Major Robert Anderson, Hero of Fort Sumter

 
[detail, Maps.71495.(54)]

Many people's sympathies were divided by secession in 1861.  Major Anderson, who had served as an artillery officer in the Black Hawk, Seminole and Mexican wars, was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and owned a few enslaved African Americans in his wife's state of Georgia.  Believing that secession was ultimately inevitable, he wrote that, 'In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South.'  Nonetheless, his commitment to the Union and the constitution of the United States ensured he remained loyal to Washington, and he was placed in command of the three federal forts at Charleston, South Carolina.  When that state seceded on 20 December, he realised that only Fort Sumter, an island in Charleston Harbor, was defensible, and secretly moved there during the night of 26 December. 

There then began a long blockade by confederate forces, in which Anderson faced dwindling supplies and the worry that he might be responsible for starting a war.   Soon, the entire, but divided, nation, was watching the standoff.

On 11 April, his former student, the confederate brigadier general Pierre Beauragard demanded his surrender. Anderson refused, at at 4:30 a.m. on 12 April, bombardment of the fort began.  The barrage continued for 34 hours.  Along with 127 officers and men, and 43 civilians, Anderson defended the fort until he they were finally forced to surrender on 13 April, and the banner was lowered on April 14. 

His defence made him the Union's first war hero, celebrated in portraits such as the one above, taken from a contemporary map, which placed him alongside images of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.  After serving in Kentucky and Tennessee, he returned to Fort Sumter on 14 April 1865, where he once again raised the Union flag.

He died in Nice, in 1871.  His letters to his wife during the Mexican War are published in An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846-7. Letters of Robert Anderson ... (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York & London, 1911) [9555.v.2]

 

Bang!

 

As if by clockwork, the first bunch of US Civil War maps arrive for the sesquicentennial (although we got a jump start yesterday, with an Eccles Centre conference on the war, featuring my rambling thoughts on the early oil industry during the war years, and the very brilliant Amanda Foreman talking about The World on Fire).  Lot's more to follow.  Meanwhile, here's Fort Sumter for you.

[MS]

Miles O'Reilly and Irish Americans in the Civil War

Something for St Patrick's Day (as well as the tasty Viennese [sic] biscuits that Jerry has kindly brought in):

 
It's the fancy Edward F. Mullen cover of Miles O'Reilly: His Book (New York: Carleton, 1864), composed by Charles Graham Halpin (styled Halpine after his move to New York), a journalist born in Co. Meath in 1829 to Anglican parents.  He studied medicine and law at Trinity College Dublin and emigrated to Boston 1851, whereupon he became an assistant editor of the Boston Post.  He moved to New York, where he worked for the Times and Herald, covering Walker's Nicaraguan Filibuster War of 1855-6. 

In 1861, he responded to Lincoln's call to arms, and enlisted in the New York Sixty-ninth Regiment of Irish volunteers, serving in Missouri and at Hilton Head.  In 1863, a series of anti-draft riots led to the first of his stories and poems of the exploits of Miles O'Reilly in the New York Herald as an attempt to drum up support for the military among the New York Irish. Fiercely egalitarian, O'Reilly rarely refuses the opportunity to tell his superiors how to win the war; the tales were a great success, and were widely reprinted.  And, as the American National Biography puts it: 'he helped change the image of the Irish in the North and gave the Irish themselves a sense that they had a future in the United States, that the country was worth fighting for'. 

Overwork and insomnia led to overdose of chloroform in 1868, not far from the Herald offices.  For a photo of him, visit the Pageant of America in the NYPL Digital Library.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

[M.J.S.]

The U.S. Civil War on the Web: a guide [updated 2.8.11]

U.S. history titles on the Civil War probably outnumber any other historical subject (although WWII may give it a run for its money); the same is probably true for the web.  As part of our Civil War project, we plan to curate some of it - selecting the best or the first ports of call. 

1. Discovering the Civil War

Site: http://archives.gov/exhibits/civil-war/

Description: Linked to the National Archives exhibition (from 30 April 2011), but also serving as a guide to their resources, with an excellent guide to existing National Archive-related materials, such as Kevin J. Foster's 'The Diplomats Who Sank a Fleet:
The Confederacy's Undelivered European Fleet and the Union Consular Service' (Prologue, Fall, 2001).  The site and exhibition also sees things in global terms.

Includes digitised collection items, guides and multimedia materials.

Follow them on Twitter.

Audience: General public, schools, librarians, undergraduates

Date visited: 2011-02-01

2. Southern Cultures: the sesquicentennial: how should we remember the Civil War?

Site: http://www.southerncultures.org/content/read/read_by_subject/civil_war/

Description: featured content from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including older articles and new essays focussing on the Civil War in collective (Southern) memory.  Links to selected articles from the journal Southern Cultures via Project Muse.

Audience: undergraduate and research.

Date visited: 2011-03-08

3. Places in History (Library of Congress)

Site: http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/placesinhistory/archive/2011/20110301_descriptiveintro.html

Description: Beginning March 4, 2011 until April 20, 2015, the Geography and Map Division will post selected maps from its digitized collections relating to political and economic issues leading up to the Civil War as well as military maps ranging from maps of minor skirmishes to major battles during the week of the 150th anniversary of those conflicts. Each map is accompanied by text discussing the selected maps, as well as citations and references. The site will be updated weekly during the four year anniversary of the Civil War and a keyword searchable weekly archive accompanies the site.

See also: Library of Congress Civil War Maps.

Audience: General public, schools, librarians, undergraduates

Date visited: 2011-03-08

4. Civil War Resources: Teaching the Sesquicentennial

Site: http://blog.historians.org/resources/1289/civil-war-resources-teaching-the-sesquicentennial

Description: A collection of useful teaching resources links from the American Historical Association. Includes links to lesson plans.

See also: http://blog.historians.org/resources/785/civil-war-resources

Audience: teachers, students, general public, academics

Date visited: 2011-02-22

5. Union or Secession: Virginians Decide (Library of Virginia) 

Site: http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/union_or_secession/

Description: Drawn primarily from the collections of the Library of Virginia, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide presents private letters, public debates, and other records that allow Virginians who experienced the crisis between the autumn of 1860 and the summer of 1861 to explain their thoughts, fears, and decisions in their own words. Union or Secession also contains the life stories of forty Virginians who experienced slavery, the sectional tensions of the 1850s, the secession crisis, and the split of their state into two.

Audience: teachers, schools, general public, researchers

Date visited: 2011-03-30

6. Life and Limb.  The Toll of the American Civil War (U.S. National Library of Medicine)

Site: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/LifeandLimb/

Description: The perspectives of surgeons, physicians, and nurses are richly documented in the history of Civil War medicine, which highlights the heroism and brutality of battlefield operations and the challenges of caring for the wounded during wartime. Yet the experiences of injured soldiers during the conflict and in the years afterwards are less well-known. Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War focuses on disabled veterans and their role as symbols of the fractured nation.

Audience: teachers, schools, general public

Date visited: 2011-03-30

Reviews, etc:

McPherson, James M., 'What Drove the Terrible War' (A. Foreman, A World on Fire; G. Gallagher, The Union War, A. Goodheart, 1861; D. Goldfield, America Aflame; G. Rable, God's Almost Chosen Peoples), review article in New York Review of Books, 14 July 2011. [accessed 2 Aug 2011]  Review contained additional footnotes to the printed article.

[M.J.S.]