Many learners expect archives and collections to be comprehensive. If a document isn’t listed or a story isn’t included, it must not exist! Yet archives and collections themselves contain silences. In the past, people made decisions that certain primary sources were not worthy of preservation or study and therefore deliberately excluded them from collections—those decisions created these silences. When it comes to the history of women—particularly women of color, immigrant women, and working-class women—these silences are even more apparent. How can you understand or learn the history of women in the United States when there is a perceived lack of primary sources on which to base that inquiry? 

• What questions do we need to ask to find women's stories in the archives?
• What sources do we need to find in order to answer those questions?

Use this album to explore this history of the Civil War while examining the silences in the archive and reintegrating women's history into your curriculum.

Essential Question: How do people experience war?

Supporting Questions:

• Whose lives do we know the most about?
• What events affect people’s lives?
• Was everyone’s experience/life during the Civil War the same?

To fully understand people's experiences during the Civil War, we need to understand the battlefield, the journey to freedom, and the home front. The journey to freedom and the home front (often the spaces given less attention in traditional history curriculum) that we find women's stories.