Production Update: We're Doing Research at The Library Company of Philadelphia

By Carole Adrienne We've been selecting more images for the documentary series and trailer at one of my favorite research facilities. The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, is an independent research library concentrating on American society and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Free and open to the public, the Library Company houses an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art. This place is heaven for the serious researcher. The staff is brilliant and enthusiastic, the facility is comfortable, beautiful...

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How a Government Worker Discovered Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office

By Matt Blitz, 11-13-15 On the day before Thanksgiving 1996, General Services Administration carpenter Richard Lyons was conducting a final review of a decrepit building at 437 Seventh Street, Northwest, that had recently fallen into government possession and was now set for demolition. Coming in from the cold rain, he entered the dusty old building alone. On the first floor (which was once a shoe store), he checked for infrastructure damage, trash, and whether anybody had made it their temporary home. Then, he moved to the second floor and did a similar sweep. He moved to third floor. “There were no lights… it was dark,” Lyons tells Washingtonian,...

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Field Hospital Flag Exhibited in Atlanta Aided Stretcher-Bearers, Witnessed War's Horrors

By Phil Gast, 5-23-16 (Photographs courtesy of Atlanta History Center) Before he became a renowned landscape and marine painter, Harrison Bird Brown created signs and banners. During the Civil War, his business in Portland, Maine, produced a U.S. Army field hospital flag that had a distinctive yellow background and contrasting green “H” for hospital (style specified in January 1864 Army regulations). One of Brown’s flags is among only a dozen such banners believed to have survived the Civil War. Gordon Jones The flag was donated last year to the Atlanta History Center, where it is displayed near the “Agonies of the Wounded” case at the center’s...

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Quirky Places: Last Casualty of the Civil War

By Ryan Whirty That and other stories haunt the Alexandria National Cemetery In March 1864, a 21-year-old man from Jay County, Ind. – the small town of Portland, to be specific – enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to the 34th Indiana Regiment, also known as the Morton Rifles, Company B. That’s how young John Jefferson Williams, a blacksmith by trade, began his service in the Civil War. Now, nearly a century and a half later, that Indiana boy rests under the ground in Pineville, one of thousands of Union troops buried at Alexandria National Cemetery. Williams holds the distinction of being the last soldier killed in the War...

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The Gatling Gun: A Civil War Innovation

By A.B. Feuer, 12-16-15 “If war was made more terrible, it would have a tendency to keep peace among the nations of the earth.” - Richard Gatling, Inventor of the Gatling Gun Richard Gatling was born in Hertford County, NC, on December 12, 1818. His father was a prosperous farmer and inventor, and the son was destined to inherit the “invention bug.” After three of his sisters died at a young age from disease, Richard Gatling decided to study medicine, and graduated from the Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati in 1850. He moved to Indianapolis the same year, and in 1854 married the daughter of a prominent local physician. There is no evidence...

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Civil War Alcohol Abuse: Forty-rod, Blue Ruin & Oh Be Joyful

By David A. Norris, 9-20-15 With a plethora of colorful nicknames, alcohol was widely abused in both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Union General Benjamin Butler was baffled. Every night a picket guard went to an outpost 1½ miles from Fort Monroe, Virginia. The soldiers departed for their shift perfectly sober, yet when they returned to the post the next morning they caused trouble “on account of being drunk.” Investigations failed to reveal the source of their whiskey. Searches of canteens and gear turned up nothing suspicious. But there was one odd thing about the detachment: someone in Butler’s command noticed that...

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Columbus and Coca-Cola (excerpted)

From: americancivilwarstory.com John Stith Pemberton was injured during the Battle of Columbus. He received a saber slash across his chest during the struggle for the 14th Street bridge. Like many other wounded veterans, he became addicted to the morphine that was used for a pain-killer. Pemberton was a pharmacist and decided to work on a medicine that would help relieve his addiction. Eventually he came up with a formula which was basically a wine infused with coca (cocaine), kola nut (caffeine), and damiana (purported aphrodisiac). This was essentially an imitation of a very successful French medicinal wine called Vin Mariani, but Vin...

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Suffering Veterans - The American Civil War and PTSD

By Emma Walton Much has been written about the lives and deeds of Civil War soldiers, but little has been said about their mental state. This is in part because the practice of psychiatry was not established by the cessation of hostilities, and attitudes to mental illness were then very different to those we hold today. However, there is significant evidence of disturbed behavior from Civil War veterans to support a theory that many were irreversibly damaged by their experiences during the war. Many undoubtedly suffered from what is today referred to as 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder' The History of PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)...

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Angel’s Glow: Bioluminescence Uncovered on the Battlefield

By Radhika Ganeshan, 7-16-14 If battlegrounds could speak they would have many stories to tell.  In some cases the microbes found in those soils have lived on to separate fact from fiction. One such story has its origins in the Battle of Shiloh, which went down in history as one of the bloodiest battles fought during the American Civil War.  As the soldiers lay mortally wounded on the cold, hard grounds of Shiloh waiting for medical aid, they noticed a very strange phenomenon. Some of the wounds actually appeared to be glowing in the dark casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. And the legend goes that soldiers...

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