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Online access to
15 Civil War stories from the pages of
Harper's Weekly: Experience military and civilian life
during the
Civil War as the 500,000 readers of Harper's Weekly
did…and be
sure to look at the related news
articles, illustrations, cartoons,
and commentary—selected specifically for this site. |
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Bombardment of Fort Sumter by the Batteries of
the Confederate States on April 13, 1861
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The Life of a Spy - In Nine Tableaux
October 24, 1863
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| What's Unique About
This Website? |
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| About one-third of Harper’s
Weekly consists of stories, serial novels, verse and other forms of
literature. This sampler highlights 15 stories pertaining to the Civil War. |
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| The stories have been classified under broad topical headings as shown
below. In addition, relevant history and military background from news articles, illustrations,
cartoons and editorials
have been included to provide context for each story as the readers of that time would
have been informed. |
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Warning
Website visitors should be
warned that several of the words, descriptions, and images from Harper’s
Weekly are considered racially offensive by today’s standards.
The materials are presented in order to give a true historical picture
of the leading 19th century newspaper’s view of black
Americans. We at HarpWeek hope this site will serve as a valuable
resource which provides an important perspective on the multifaceted
history of black Americans, generates a deeper understanding and
respect for the subject, and sparks further interest in its study
and discussion.
Professor Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School, a well-known scholar on the use of derogatory language in a racial and historic context, has advised HarpWeek not to censor the original content of Harper’s Weekly, even if it contains language or caricatures that may offend today’s viewers. To understand why, please read his essay
A Note on the Word
"Nigger."
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Story Length
All of these stories would fit on a page or less of Harper's Weekly. To help you judge a story's length, the number of column inches in Harper's Weekly is in parenthesis next to each title. One column was 14 inches and there were four columns to a page. Therefore, 28 column inches was half a page and 56 column inches was a full page.
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Credit
These stories have been selected from a
31-lesson syllabus prepared for HarpWeek by Dr. Kathleen Diffley, who is Associate
Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She currently is completing the second
volume of a projected trilogy on Civil War stories in the popular wartime press.
Supplementing her initial focus on Constitutional reform in Where My Heart Is
Turning Ever, her second book examines the literary market place in the years
following Appomattox when national recollection was furthered in the South and West as
well as the culturally dominant Northeast. Professor Diffley’s essays on nineteenth
century magazine culture have appeared in American Quarterly, Prospect,
American Literary History, and Books at Iowa.
Professor Diffley utilized the HarpWeek indexes to
identify the stories and related illustrations, news articles, editorials and cartoons.
She found the synopses, which HarpWeek has prepared for every piece of
prose, to be particularly helpful. |
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