The Last Full Measure: Civil War Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection
Library of Congress
This exhibition features Civil War-era ambrotype and tintype photographs of Union and Confederate soldiers. The collection’s detailed portraits document the soldier uniforms, weapons, musical instruments and other possessions and include significant representation of African American troops and the families of soldiers. The exhibition marks the beginning of the Library of Congress’s sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War and brings new attention to the war as a seminal event in American history.
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New York in the War of Rebellion, 1861-1865
Frederick Phisterer
New York State Library
This six-volume set, compiled by Frederick Phisterer, provides detailed information on various aspects of New York State’s role in the Civil War and is an important resource for conducting research into New York State regiments during the Civil War. Each regimental history in this set includes information on when and where a regiment was recruited, the names of its officers, the battles in which the regiment participated, and the casualties suffered.
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New York in the Civil War Resources
New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center
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The Blue and The Gray: Poem
Francis M. Finch
From Atlantic Monthly
The Blue and the Gray, a Civil War poem of reconciliation by Francis M. Finch, former Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals. Finch read a news item in New York Tribune describing how the women of Columbus, Mississippi, “strewed flowers alike on the graves of the Confederate and of the National Soldiers.” Inspired by this report, he wrote this poem that was published in the Atlantic Monthly in September, 1867. It immediately struck a chord with the American public. For many years after the war, the poem was read at the grave-side of Civil War soldiers during Memorial Day ceremonies, usually by a young girl in a white dress.
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Disunion Series
The New York Times
The Disunion series in the New York Times revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period. It will use contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical analysis to follow the Civil War as it unfolded. Here are links to some of the entries concerning women.
Read Women at War
Read What Were the Women Doing
Read Women and Children First
Read Ms. Dix Comes to Washington
The Civil War Homefront
Drew Gilpin Faust
National Park Service
“In a two-volume History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1882, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage hailed the war as transformative. ‘The social and political condition of women was largely changed by our Civil War,’ they wrote. ‘In large measure,’ they explained, it was because war ‘created a revolution in woman herself.’ In the North, the war provided a catalyst for women’s advancement into both professional nursing and medicine…which leads historian Elizabeth Leonard to conclude that northern nurses ‘trespassed en masse into the public sphere‘ and became ‘wielders of a new kind of institutional power previously hoarded by men.'”
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What’s Gender Got To Do With It?
Lillian Serece Williams
From State of the Union: New York and the Civil War
“Men and women, white and black, were involved in every aspect of war on the battlefield as well as on the home front. Men and women, regardless of their race, used the war to mediate the ideals of American democracy and directly linked the successful waging of the war to the extension of freedom… White women were empowered and began an aggressive campaign to get the vote. Black and white women experienced expanded job opportunities and greater access to the public sector and for some perhaps greater independence as a result of the Civil War.”
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Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Third Geneva Convention, 1949)
International Committee of the Red Cross
This authoritative commentary on the 1949 Geneva Conventions examines the Convention, article by article, and deals with questions concerning the implementation and application of international humanitarian law.
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Moral Principles vs. Military Necessity: The First Code of Conduct During Warfare, Created by a Civil War-era Prussian Immigrant, Reflected Ambiguities We Struggle With Today
David Bosco
From The American Scholar
“Lieber’s insistence that prisoners of war were not criminals but detainees entitled to certain rights became accepted doctrine… As warfare evolves, then, and as conflicts develop, ethicists and regulators must struggle to keep pace, holding the line where they can, ceding ground where they must.”