Web Resources
First launched in 2016 and continually expanded, the Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK) project from the Kentucky Historical Society provides free online access to the letters and papers sent to and from the commonwealth’s governors between 1860 and 1865. Its scope includes the administrations of Kentucky’s three recognized wartime governors as well as two Confederate shadow government executives. As nineteenth-century Americans wrote to their governors about myriad issues ranging from military and legal matters to social and personal concerns regarding poverty, public health, race and emancipation, religion, refugees, and more, CWGK’s more than twenty-nine thousand primary sources represent the written record of diverse Kentuckians of various races, genders, ages, and beliefs. Documents on the site are collected from multiple institutions, are keyword searchable, and may be browsed by subject, repository, format, collection, and other attributes thus facilitating unprecedented levels of access to said materials.
As the digital collections platform for the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center, ExploreUK offers free online access to more than 530,000 digitized archival and rare print resources. This includes tens of thousands of Civil War-related materials such as diaries, photographs, broadsides, newspapers, letters and illustrated envelopes, military and business records, and rare books. Civilian, veteran, and scholarly experiences and perspectives on the war and its memory in Kentucky and beyond are represented. Items may be filtered by date, format, language, or collection, such as the “Camp Nelson photographic collection” or the “Kentucky Civil War Commission press releases,” and are accompanied by finding aids offering contextual and administrative information.
Originally published in 128 print volumes by the United States War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies is now available online through Cornell University's Making of America website. The site links to digitized, full-text, keyword-searchable versions of each volume. The series consists of transcribed copies of military and state correspondence, orders, reports, and other records from both U.S. and Confederate forces. Long considered the most comprehensive and essential Civil War research companion, the OR as it has become known includes copies of thousands of military records from or concerning Kentucky.