| The Project |
This project showcases the John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection, which contains tens of thousands of letters, diaries, and photographs from the Civil War era. John L. Nau III (CLAS 1968), a tireless champion of historical preservation, donated the collection to the University of Virginia in 2019. While researchers can view the original records in person at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at UVA, our digital projects makes them accessible to scholars around the world.
The project features transcriptions of every document in the collection, as well as photographs, maps, biographies, and contextual essays. Together, this material captures the stories of the "ordinary" people--Union and Confederate, soldiers and civilians, men and women--who experienced America's deadliest conflict.
This project would not have been possible without the generous help of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and Mr. John L. Nau III.
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| Contributors | |
| Jeremy Nelson UVA Graduate Student |
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| Kathryn Patterson UVA Graduate Student |
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| Cathryn Perini UVA Graduate Student |
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| Presley Ramey UVA Graduate Student |
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| Neil Salazar UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2023) |
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| Amanda Kopf UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2023) |
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| Jacob Phillips UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2025) |
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| Ian Baumer UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2023) |
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| Anna Deatherage UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2025) |
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| Kristen Davidson-Schwartz UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2022) |
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| Hannah Fleming UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2024) |
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| Greyson Bettendorf UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2024) |
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| Gracie Firgau UVA Undergraduate |
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| Chesney Whitmore UVA Undergraduate (CLAS 2024) |
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Center Staff |
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Brian C. Neumann is Managing Director of the Nau Civil War Center. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020 under the direction of Elizabeth R. Varon, and he served as an editorial assistant on the Nau Center's Black Virginians in Blue and UVA Unionists digital projects. His first book, Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, was published by LSU Press in 2022.
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Caroline E. Janney is Director of the Nau Civil War Center and John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War. A native of the Shenandoah Valley, she is the author or editor of six books, including Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox (UNC Press, 2021), Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Littlefield Fund for Southern History and University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Remembering the Civil War was selected for the History Book Club and Military Book Club and won the Charles S. Sydnor Award by the Southern Historical Association and the Jefferson Davis Award by the American Civil War Museum. |
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Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. Varon grew up in northern Virginia. She received her PhD from Yale, and has held teaching positions at Wellesley College and Temple University. A specialist in the Civil War era and 19th-century South, Varon is the author of We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (1998); Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (2003), Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (2008), Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (2013), Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (2019), and Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (2022). |
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Gary W. Gallagher is Director Emeritus of the Nau Civil War Center and John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War. A native of Los Angeles, he is the author or editor of more than thirty-five books, including The Confederate War (Harvard University Press, 1997), Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011), and Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty (University of Georgia Press, 2013). He has served as editor of three book series at the University of North Carolina Press: "Civil War America," with more than 105 titles to date; “Military Campaigns of the Civil War,” with 10 titles; and the “Littlefield History of the Civil War Era,” with 10 titles. |
