Browse Items (916 total)

I have always had an interest in history. I can remember as a young boy fighting my way through the woods with my father near my grandparents’ house to get to the old family graveyard. I was fascinated by one grave in particular. It was marked with…

Dear Sister,

I suppose I would write you a few lines. I thought you would be uneasy. Sister, the Yankees have been here. They say there was seven thousand, but I don’t know how many there was but it was the most men I ever saw and some say ten…

The cartoon “Under Which Flag” emphasizes the importance race and gender played in the post-war South. The cartoon depicted two candidates with their flags and platforms. The white flag has the white rule platform promising good government,…

This cartoon plays on the fear that Whites had towards African Americans. As pictured, free African Americans are dancing with white women, replacing the white male populace. Targeted at Southerners, many feared the abolition of slavery and its…

This Ku Klux Klan mask belonged to Colonel John Campbell Van Hook Jr, of Person County, North Carolina.

This is a picture of the most infamous commandant of the Confederate Salisbury prison. He was basically the warden of the prison during the most detrimental and deadly period of the prison's existence. He, like Wirz, was accused of crimes against…

"They hung my son by the limb of a tree"

Drawing of a Civil War deserter being hanged from a tree.

Photograph of a reunion of Thomas' Legion

The North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, North Carolina, showed an exhibit entitled "North Carolina and the Civil War" from 1999 to 2005. The exhibit focused on the North Carolinians who lived, served, and sacrificed during the war.

Southern states, including North Carolina, had prohibited teaching slaves to read and write prior to the Civil War. With emancipation, former slaves clamored for schools. With the assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau and northern organizations, like…