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In 1875 Whitman copyrighted Memoranda During the
War, and in the following year released the volume via a private
printing of approximately one thousand copies.
Much of Memoranda had already appeared in five articles he had
written for the New
York Times during the war and six articles published in the New
York Weekly Graphic in 1874 (the journalism link will take you to
etexts of these pieces).
In Memoranda Whitman was little concerned with the public events of the war and instead focussed the narrative on his personal experiences with the soldiers he had met in the Union hospitals. This annotated edition includes extensive biographical information on these soldiers collected by independent scholar Martin G. Murray. This information can be used to assess and analyze the accuracy of Whitman's representations of the soldiers. It can also be used to investigate questions such as if Whitman represented foreign-born soldiers differently than native-born soldiers, if he commemorated both younger and older soldiers, or if he was particularly partial to soldiers from his home state of New York. The Memoranda link on the left will take you to the annotated etext; the index link will take you to an index of the biographical annotations for the soldiers mentioned in Memoranda. The etext of Memoranda was provide by means of a collaborative agreement between the editors of the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive, Primary Source Media, and the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. |