Purpose

This site was developed as a clearinghouse for scholarship on the New York Draft Riots of July 1863. It was designed to offer both scholars and interested students of history easy access to an online bibliography of materials including book length discussions of the historic importance of the riots (sometimes called the “civil war within the Civil War”), popular explanation for non-specialists, scholarly articles, access to certain primary sources and imagery associated with the riots.

Collection Development Policy

This site is intended to offer materials that directly discuss the draft riots and the lasting impact to New York City and U.S. history. Discussions of the Civil War more generally or ancillary issues are excluded as a way to provide visitors with a focused and, hopefully, useful collection. Visitors are welcome to post comments and offer their interpretations of the materials and suggestions for additional materials to be added.

If there is a single category of information that has been excluded, it is the as yet unstudied materials produced by soldiers who helped quell the riots. Historian Iver Bernstein, an expert on the riots whose work I depended on very heavily for creating this site mentions the absence of any scholarly compilation from the soldiers’ point of view. So far as I know, no work has been published to address this missing piece of the historical narrative.

Finding Aids

The site is fairly simple. The menus indicate the main types of material linked within each group; editorial explanations are kept to a minimum here. Users may rely instead on the enhancements offered by the institutions that maintain the materials. Publications, whether book or article, contain their own internal means of locating information.

Thank you!

I am indebted to the terrific faculty of the City College of New York, especially archivist William Gibbons, who oversaw this project as part of his class on Archives, Archivists and Preserving Cultural Heritage and historian Alexandra Stern whose class on the Civil War and Reconstruction first introduced me to the details of the draft riots. They are both superb professors and I am grateful for their instruction; their dedication to their students is remarkable. I appreciate the effort they put in to engage their students and encourage additional explorations of their subjects.

About Me

I will be attending the CUNY Graduate Center’s program in New York City history in September 2021. I am a retired law librarian and the author of three books about online research, most recently How to Find Out Anything.

– Don MacLeod
New York, NY
dunvegan@panix.com