Wisconsin Goes to War: Our Civil War Experience

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About the Collection

Wisconsin Goes to War: Our Civil War Experience is a collection of first person narrative accounts of Wisconsin soldiers and citizens. Through their letters, diaries, poems and other records, we learn about the state's contributions to the Union victory that cost the lives of over 12,000 of the state's men. The collections were originally selected for digitization among those of the Wisconsin Historical Society for use by Civil War history courses taught at UW Oshkosh. These records were chosen based on the subject matter and legibility of the documents. The original UW Oshkosh digital project has now been reconceived and enhanced by the UWDC to provide for greater operability and discovery.

Many of the included documents are handwritten while others consist of a typed transcription for which originals may or may not be available. In most cases however, a electronic text version is also provided allowing researchers to conduct keyword searching. In several cases, collections represented here DO NOT include all of the material available in the original, physical form at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Materials from larger collections that were not subject appropriate for the digital version or could not be safely digitized have been excluded. Contact the Wisconsin Historical Society's archives reading room ( http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/) to determine if more historical material is available from any specific collection.

The first phase of the collection consists of 630 pages of materials dating from the years 1861 – 1866. When the entire project is completed it will consist of over 2600 pages of original Civil War documents.

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.