Downtime & Debauchery in Civil War Washington

The Humanities And Technology Summer 2016
@DC Public Library Special Collections

Introduction

In the Summer of 2016, three DC-area high school students spent three-weeks researching the Bawdy Houses (brothels) of Civil War Washington. In the course of their study, they researched the small amount of existing scholarship. What they found was incomplete and in need of primary source documentation. Soon they were well on their way to graduate school-level scholarship. In examining "Civil War Washington" [civilwardc.org], an award-winning digital collection prepared by Kenneth Winkle, a renowned Civil War and Lincoln scholar, the students found that the layer for their area of research was incomplete. This was an organic way for students to generate questions based on existing scholarship and identify what resources were available to enable them to add to that scholarship. The group became the first high school students to digitize documents for the National Archives' Catalog. They were also the first group to do the same for the DCPL catalog, DigDC. Below is a sample of their contribution.

Previously Existing Scholarship

Civil War Washington
NEH-funded
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Kenneth J. Winkle supervised

The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War
and
The Civil War Bawdy Houses of Washington, D.C.
By Thomas P. Lowry*
*Banned for life from the National Archives

New Scholarship, 2016 (click here to view full screen)

New Additions to the Scholarship, digitized 2016

Provost Marshal of the Defenses of Washington (City) 22nd Army Corps
Communications regarding Bawdy Houses, including Special Order 107 (April 18, 1862), calling for regulation of the houses, including an inventory and subsequent raids (May 2, 1862 and 1864) NARA Record Group 393 pt I & II