Special Collections Research Center Blog

Disease and Correspondence in the Civil War

Currently, in Swem Library’s Special Collections Research Center (Swem SCRC), I have been working on uploading a number of small collections to the From Fights to Rights Transcription Project.  Some of the most interesting discussions I come across in these letters are about the various illnesses that permeated 19^th century life.  It is incredibly eye-opening to read these accounts of illness and disease since they give an otherwise-unknown window into peoples’ lives.

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Add comment April 30th, 2012

Connecting with the past

When I started my work in the Special Collections Research Center here at Swem Library in August, one of my first projects entailed uploading metadata to our online database for the Nathaniel V. Watkins Family Papers, 1846-1889. This collection is now digitized to help preserve it, but is also part of our ongoing Civil War Transcription Project. All of the Watkins Papers from the Civil War era are currently online, which means that they are now ready to be transcribed and shared with researches worldwide. (more…)

Add comment December 7th, 2011