Browsing by Subject "soldiers"

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    Conflicted Duty on the Indiana Home Front: A Family’s Civil War Story
    (2020-01) Tanzer, Anastasia; Morgan, Anita; Cramer, Kevin; Robertson, Nancy Marie
    This project looks at the Ketcham family of Indianapolis and analyzes how each member had a different sense of duty that led them to take on different activities during the Civil War. It includes both a typical thesis portion and a public history supplement that takes the form of an exhibit brief. The supplement provides an alternate means of presenting the family to the public. The Ketchams were a white, upper-class family, so although many of their ideas and activities aligned with those of others across the northern United States, in this thesis I argue that they also had a unique experience. For example, the matriarch, Jane Merrill Ketcham, chose to serve as a nurse, as did many other women, but her decision took precedence over her husband’s preference. This assertion was noteworthy because, during this time period, women were still typically expected to defer to their fathers or husbands. This conclusion, and others throughout the project, are based on an analysis of both primary and secondary sources. The main primary sources used were the letters included in the Ketcham collection at the Indiana Historical Society, which provided insight to the thoughts, opinions, and activities of most family members – some members had fewer surviving letters than others. Scholarship regarding the Civil War from national, regional, and local perspectives allowed for a fuller picture of what the prevailing views and activities were and understand how the Ketchams were either emblematic of the common experience or different from it.
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    A New Look at Old Abe’s Color Guard
    (Coddington, 2019) Phillips, Tyler; Zou, Xukai; Byrd, Kenneth E.; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Many images of the American Civil War exist today and allow us to gain insight into the lives’ of those involved in the conflict. Unfortunately, these images also pose questions as many of the soldiers they depict are unidentified or identified with unknown reliability. One such image is that of the Wisconsin Infantry Color Guard and their bald eagle mascot “Old Abe.” One of the men in the color guard has been identified as George W. Riley due to an inscription on the back of the image. We perform state-of-art biometric-facial analysis of this soldier and several candidate identities. Through this biometric analysis and corroborating historical documents, we present compelling evidence that this soldier is not George W. Riley, but is more likely Walter J. Quick.