id was set in the arguments array for the "side panel" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-1". Manually set the id to "sidebar-1" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home/netscrib/public_html/civilwarcavalry/wp-includes/functions.php on line 4239id was set in the arguments array for the "footer" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-2". Manually set the id to "sidebar-2" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home/netscrib/public_html/civilwarcavalry/wp-includes/functions.php on line 4239Thanks for the post and I couldn’t agree more about the utility of newspapers in Civil War research and – for my own forthcoming book – I drew on more than a dozen different papers from “A to Z” – well, A to W anyway: Adams Sentinel to Wisconsin Daily State Journal.
I don’t generally like to tout commercial services, but I’ve had good success with http://www.newspaperarchive.com
It’s amazing, though, how many papers are putting their own archives online…recently, the NY Times made their Civil War era article PDFs available for free (they used to be #-4 each, I think) and they have a good search engine also.
I agree with your “reliability” point in terms of soldier correspondence to the papers, but would caution on actual traditional reporting, as things could change dramatically in a few days’ time as to the “truth.” I have a collection of papers that span a wekk or so after the Battle of Wilson’s Creek…the initial reports differ substantially from reports of just a few days later…still, in my mind, that’s a story in itself.
Keep up the great work,
Jim Schmidt
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