The Civil War Day by Day
http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/civilwar/
Created and maintained by the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina.
Reviewed March-May 2012.

Designed to compile a documentary record of the Civil War during the sesquicentennial observance, this Web site was launched in April 2011 and will run through 2015. By the end of the project, The Civil War Day by Day will have compiled a permanent catalog of more than 1,458 primary-source documents—including letters, diaries, newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, government records, order books, and sheet music—from the various branches of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina.

The site is actually an innovative blog that provides firsthand accounts of the war to educators and budding historians. As stated on the mission page, "Our hope is that a community of researchers, anxious to share their interpretations, questions, and perhaps, even their transcriptions will emerge as frequent contributors to Civil War Day by Day." Toward that end, every section of the site, which includes links to several other blogs and current discussions of the historical chronology of the war in the Washington Post and the New York Times, provides the means for reader feedback.

The site’s home page posts a new document each day, written or published on that same date during the war. Each document appears both as a photographic image of the original and in transcription. Immediately following each new document are others from the preceding seven days. For example, selecting one day at random, a user would find an excerpt from the well-known diary of Sarah Lois Wadley but also, covering the previous week, a pair of drawings from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, a series of four entries from the diary of a Tennessee woman, and letters written by two Union soldiers (one from Michigan and the other from New York). All previous daily entries, or any of a variety of specific topics (such as secession or women) may be retrieved through a convenient search engine.

The site’s second most prominent feature, “Classroom Resources,” suggests ways to incorporate primary sources in teaching the Civil War. The suggestions are generic, designed to accommodate both grammar school and college teachers, but they are useful. Excerpts from many other documents (transcriptions only) are made available for this purpose, subdivided by category within the University of North Carolina library system: the “Southern Historical Collection,” "Rare Books,“ the ”North Carolina Collection,“ and the ”University Archives." This tab also provides links to other sites that suggest ways to enliven the teaching of southern history, North Carolina history (designed especially for K-12 teachers), and general American history (through links to the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress).

All of these features are easily navigable, even for a quill-and-paper man such as myself, and all documents and comments may be shared on Facebook or through Twitter. There is also a five-minute video to give users a behind-the-scenes look at how the archivists at the University of North Carolina organize and preserve manuscripts and rare books, and to emphasize that the range of wartime topics covered in their collections include not only soldiers and battles but also slavery and the home front.

Daniel E. Sutherland
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, Arkansas