Private Voices is the offspring of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL) project, an effort to amass a large number of letters penned by individuals with limited educations who knew little about formal conventions of punctuation and capitalization. The About section includes the following subsections:

Introduction provides an overview of the project as well as plans for future expansion.

Common Soldiers and Plain Folk provides historical context for understanding the letter-writers and their times.

Project Directors gives brief biographies of the two directors of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters project, Michael Ellis (Missouri State University) and Michael Montgomery (University of South Carolina).

Credits thanks all the research assistants, graduate seminarians, and participating archives that have made the project possible.

NEXT: Introduction