Preview
Creation Date
2024
Description
Soldiers’ diaries and correspondence provide invaluable insights into the Civil War. Letter writing exponentially increased during the war years – while the average person sent five letters per year, soldiers wrote five times as many. Correspondence allowed soldiers to maintain relationships while separated from loved ones, assuage anxieties about their wellbeing, and endure the brutality of war by reading of the homes they dearly missed. These firsthand accounts supply historians with the lived experiences of ordinary people, and the Special Collection Library holds hundreds of these valuable resources.
Keywords
U.S. Civil War 1861-1865