Letter by Frank W. Obriham to his mother, June and Gilbert Krueger collection of Civil War letters [Box 1, Folder 10], Collection no. 0167, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California
Students working in the
department routinely come into close contact with amazing archival materials. Here on Libwire, we're sharing occasional dispatches from these students about the collections they work with. Here's USC undergraduate Lisa Ebiner Gavit on the June and Gilbert Krueger collection of Civil War letters.
A recent collection which I worked on in Special Collections was an assortment of letters from the Civil War period. The letters were from four brothers fighting in the Union army to various family members back home. I really enjoyed reading what they had to say about life as a soldier, how they spent their free time, and how the intense battles affected them mentally. One of the brothers died in the war, and one of the most tragic letters in the collection is from his brother writing to their parents to break the news and to give details about his death. Something surprising which I noticed was how often their fellow soldiers died not from battle wounds, but from illness in the army camps. In the end, this was a fascinating collection to look through, and I learned quite a bit about the Civil War. The image is of a poem one of the brothers sent to his mother back home.
Lisa Ebiner Gavit is a USC student majoring in philosophy with a minor in psychology.