Reconstruction-era Letters Now Available

As of late afternoon on April 17, 2012, approximately 275 pieces of Reconstruction-era correspondence are now publicly available on the Whitman Archive. We continued to slightly revise some of the letters, as well as their HTML display, between their publication on the site late yesterday afternoon and early this morning (April 18, 2012). We hope to publish another 300 pieces in the near future. All 1,200 pieces of Reconstruction-era correspondence will be available by early fall.

The publication of these letters was made possible by the support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission as well as by the hard work of many people, including Eric Conrad, Zachary King, Sarah Walker, Katie Kruger, Bev Rilett, John Schwaninger, Ashley Lawson, Kevin McMullen, and Ken Price. An even greater number of people are hard at work on forthcoming installments.

As we explain in the text that precedes the links to individual letters, you will notice some differences between the presentation of the Civil War letters that have been available for a couple of years now and the new Reconstruction letters. In addition to posting more Reconstruction letters over the coming months, we will work to make these two sets of correspondence consistent in both encoding and display by updating the Civil War letters.

~Liz