It’s here!

The wait is finally over! HSP is happy to announce its first publication in many years; a facsimile of Ellen Emlen’s Cookbook dated to 1865. The manuscript contains over 200 recipes which are clearly organized with a table of contents. Written by Mrs. Emlen’s own hand the recipes are legible and give a sense of [...]

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A few more tidbits about HSP’s Civil War resources

Over the course of 2010, you saw several of the society’s Civil War-related collections come to light through our Digital Center for Americana project.  2011 marks the beginning of a four-year event organized by the Civil War History Consortium (CWHC) to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is [...]

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The Path to the Civil War

Though I’m now working with more recent materials, I couldn’t resist one last Civil War-related post as we approach the 150th anniversary of the war. Much attention will be placed on the anniversary of the start of the war: April 12, 1861, the date that Confederates opened fire on the federal Fort Sumter in South [...]

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Women’s Views on the Civil War

Our processing work for the Digital Center for Americana pilot project is winding down. Over the last year, we’ve processed, conserved, described, and selectively digitized 51 collections at HSP that have ties to the Civil War. We worked on the papers of President James Buchanan, Treasury Secretary and Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, [...]

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More on Confederate prisons

Archaeologists in Georgia announced yesterday that they have found the site of Camp Lawton, a Confederate prison camp near Millen, Georgia. You can read more about the project at Georgia Southern University’s Camp Lawton web site. As you may remember, we processed a collection earlier in the Digital Center for Americana project that included images [...]

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Correspondence

As one of the digitization technicians for the Digital Center of Americana, I come across a lot of correspondence. When I have a moment to read some of the letters I often ask myself what may have caused the writer to send this particular set of words to his loved one, family member, boss, or [...]

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Government waste, circa 1863

I recently finished processing the Citizens’ Bounty Fund Committee records, another Civil War-era collection that we are working on as part of the Digital Center for Americana project. The Citizens’ Bounty Fund Committee formed in Philadelphia during the summer of 1862, in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for another 300,000 Union troops. Concerned about [...]

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What’s in the box?

Just a typical document box? Not so! From the Wister Family Papers, this box contained journals and record books belonging to Sarah Butler Wister from the late 1800s. Each volume received a custom-made enclosure using acid-free corrugated board or library board.

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New finding aids available!

Finding aids are now available online for the following collections: George G. Meade collection (#410) [This collection combines formerly separate collections 410 and 1407.]  Grand Army of the Republic. Philip R. Schuyler Post No. 51 records (#1825)

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One of our unknown gems

Early on in the Digital Center project, I worked on a description for the Robert Knox Sneden collection of “Sketches of Confederate Prisons.”  I discovered that not only did this collection have an obsolete call number, but it was not listed in either our OPAC or our graphics card catalog.  The only way to find [...]

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