Web Site Has Exclusives ... From the Civil War

By: Ari Berman A retirement hobby for a management consultant has turned into a national treasure, bringing critical acclaim, historical eminence, and awards to the electronic publisher. John Adler, 75, recently won the $50,000 Gettysburg College E-Lincoln Prize for a Web site, launched last year, that publishes the full contents of 47 periodicals from 1860 to 1865.

Adler has meticulously compiled a collection of publications even the Library of Congress would love to have.

It all began about a decade ago, after Adler acquired an entire 1857-1916 collection of Harper's Weekly, which he calls "the newspaper of record" at that time. Adler launched his first Web site, HarpWeek (http://www.harpweek.com), publishing the entire collection online by themes. Soon HarpWeek was providing today's newspapers with extensive contemporary coverage of Andrew Johnson's impeachment and trial (during President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal) and nearly 500 universities and libraries with previously inaccessible primary-source material.

In March 2001, after going across the country on search expeditions, Adler launched his Civil War Web site (http://www.lincolnandthecivilwar.com). Fourteen institutions donated original material, and more than 40,000 pages of text and illustrations were scanned in high resolution, and coded by HarpWeek indexers.

Although the entire collection is ready for publication (as Adler awaits further funding), he initially made available newspaper coverage of 1860, showing readers coverage of Abraham Lincoln's first presidential campaign and the events leading up to the Civil War. The site includes 11 campaign newspapers representing the four 1860 presidential candidates -- Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckenridge, and John Bell -- plus 10 satirical publications, the most-complete runs available of the New York Illustrated News, the Southern Illustrated News, and 17 publications not found at the Library of Congress. Even Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson, who wrote an introduction for the site, had not seen much of this original material.

Besides 20 pro-Union and 10 pro-Confederacy newspapers, Adler said the addition of four British pro-Confederacy newspapers makes his collection unique. Of note is The Index of London, which provides a continuous, published record of the Confederate viewpoint from May 1862 to August 1865, a time when most Southern papers faced paper, ink, and manpower shortages, leading them to be printed occasionally with shoe polish.

Additionally, Adler made abolitionist publications such as The Liberator, Douglass' Monthly, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard searchable for the first time. By looking at the abolitionist, Union, Confederate, and European papers, readers can understand the difficulty of Lincoln's life, Adler said.

With government funding running low and expenditures rising, Adler said he's looking for a private sponsor to help him put the entire 1860-1865 collection online. Meanwhile, the publisher of the past is looking toward the future: Both the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth (in 1809) and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War are less than eight years away.