Written by Mary Hart
We thought that you might touch on the war in your classrooms, so over the next few months, we’ll tell you about some of the primary sources available on the www.LOC.gov website.
A new special exhibition on the Library of Congress website features the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War photographs. Called The Last Full Measure, this collection “presents a stunning array of Civil War-era ambrotype and tintype photographs that associates human faces, often startlingly young, with statistics on both sides in this wrenching conflict. This exhibition features portraits of enlisted men in uniform—both Union and Confederate—and serves as a memorial to those who lost their lives during the war by displaying images of 360 Union soldiers in uniform—one for every thousand who died—and 52 rare images of Confederate soldiers—one for every five thousand casualties. More than 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War, a greater number of deaths than occurred in all other American wars combined through Vietnam.”
To find this exhibition is easy: simply click on the LOC link (above), and on the opening page, bottom left, you’ll see a link to all the exhibitions. The More Exhibitions link will take you to another page, and the collection link can be found toward the bottom of the first column. If that doesn’t work, here’s a direct link to the collection: http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/civilwarphotographs/pages/default.aspx .
