HIST 131: United States History I

The DPLA includes archival material and rare publications digitized by archives and libraries across the US to increase access. Try searching for phrases like "54th regiment" or "Robert Gould Shaw" with or without the quotation marks.

This is a narrowed down list of primary sources in DPLA that have the 54th Massachusetts Regiment as a subject. You can also do a search to try to find primary sources related to Robert Gould Shaw or other related subjects.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds a large amount of content related to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Some of it is displayed on this website and is also available through the Digital Public Library of America. Please be sure to go to the bottom of the site to see a list of other collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society that also contain related primary sources.

Harvard University holds a collection of Robert Gould Shaw's letters that may be useful primary sources for your assignment.

Online access to materials held by the Library of Congress. You may also see much of this material in the Digital Public Library of American (DPLA). At the top next to the search bar, select Everything and then do your search. A search for Robert Gould Shaw has some promising results.

Use NARA's catalog to search millions of archival items. Click on "Available Online" or "Archival Descriptions with Digital Objects" to focus on items that are available for online viewing and downloading.

These tips will help you learn what to pay attention to when trying to read cursive handwriting. Sometimes we can recognize letters or small words, so it's a matter of using what we do recognize to help us figure out the parts that we don't recognize.

You can use these handwritten examples and compare them to the typed transcription to practice recognizing letters and words.

These exercises let you practice transcribing (typing out) handwritten examples to see if you are correctly recognizing words.