Sunday, March 16, 2014

Digital Jewels


Regimental histories are one of my favorite genres, but until the advent of the digital age, it was difficult to locate veteran written histories. When I was in graduate school most of these had to be obtained via interlibrary loan, but many of them have been digitized and are available online. The Internet Archive has a variety of materials available for free including a wide range of veteran penned regimental histories. A quick search yielded the following histories of units that served in the trans-Mississippi:

Barney, Chester. Recollections Of Field Service With The Twentieth Iowa Infantry Volunteers (1865)

Beecher, Harris H. Record Of The 114th Regiment, N. Y. S. V. (1866)

Ewer, James K. The Third Massachusetts Cavalry In The War For The Union (1903)

Lathrop, David. History Of The Fifty-Ninth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry (1865)

Scott, John. Story Of The Thirty-Second Iowa Infantry Volunteers (1896)

Sprague, Homer B. History Of The 13th Infantry Regiment Of Connecticut Volunteers (1867)

By no means did I conduct a thorough search, so other regimentals, published diaries, memoirs, etc. await the curious. 

2 comments:

  1. Well, thank goodness that Scott's Story of the Thirty-Second Iowa is finally available for perusal. I spent years trying to get hold of a copy of that book, and only recently found one on the shelves at Tulane, which I was able to Xerox on their machine before telling the librarian that they really needed to put that thing under lock and key. Good to see that these books are becoming more available.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Like you, I am extremely pleased that the Scott book is available in a digital format. Many years ago when I was in graduate school, my university's library borrowed a copy for me via interlibrary loan--have no recollection of which library was willing to loan it, but it was much appreciated. With time, more and more of these rarities will be available digitally. Hurrah!

    ReplyDelete