Voices of the Civil War: Photos & Media

The Library of Congress has acquired a rare collection of nearly 700 Civil War-era photographs. The collection includes photographs of Union and Confederate soldiers, as well as the women and children they left behind. The collection is available on Flickr, which facilitates the help of viewers in assisting in identifying individuals and objects.

The Selected Civil War Photographs Collection contains 1,118 photographs.

With over 50,000 items, it was probably the largest ephemera collection of its time. At its core are tens of thousands of examples of printed ephemera, most from the Civil War years, including ca. 600 recruiting posters, as well as newspapers, political broadside and leaflets, tickets, trade cards, cartoons, and a complement of ribbons, buttons and other ephemeral items constituting the largest such collection documenting the Philadelphia home front.