The James S. Schoff Civil War Collection contains manuscript, photographic and printed materials relating to all phases of the American Civil War. It was established in 1974 through a series of gifts from the noted collector and Clements Library Associate, James S. Schoff. Since the time of Mr. Schoff's first donation, the Library has aggressively expanded its collections, and has seen them grow into a large and significant resource for research into both the military and social history of the War.
The Schoff Collection currently contains the correspondences or diaries of over 350 soldiers from both the Union and Confederate Armies in all theatres of action. It is organized into several series, including the Schoff Miscellaneous Manuscripts (over 1,500 individual items), Civil War Correspondences (comprised of letters from soldiers and the home front), Civil War Journals (diaries and journals from soldiers), Regimental Histories (several hundred printed regimental histories, plus Bruce Catton's personal copy of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion), and the Schoff Civil War Photographs Series.
The general collections of the Clements Library include invaluable supporting material relating to the political, economic, military, social and cultural history of the United States during mid-century. Among the Library's holdings of periodicals are complete runs for the Civil War period of newspapers for many major eastern cities, examples of wallpaper newspapers from Vicksburg (including all recorded variants), Opelousas, and elsewhere, and journals such as Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated.
The Schoff Collections are very diverse, but are particularly rich for documenting the experiences of prisoners of war, surgeons and nurses, and the U.S. "Colored" Troops, with a secondary interest in soldiers serving in "ethnic" regiments (e.g., German, Irish, Scandinavian). The collection are exhaustively catalogued, and the collections are today among the most heavily used in the Library.
Guides for Schoff Civil War Collections
Alphabetical listing:
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