Civil War Archives: A New Social and Cultural History of the Civil War

This two-week residential institute places Civil War and Reconstruction history within the context of the “the archival turn,” a scholarly intervention that explores how ideology, politics, bias, and history itself shapes the contents of archives. While scholars from Asian to European history have examined this question in relation to their fields, few Civil War historians have probed this question, despite the overwhelming abundance of Civil War archives. Paying particular attention to issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality, this Institute provides an opportunity to investigate how the archival turn can generate new ways of studying the Civil War Era.