Fort Sumter . . . Bull Run . . . Antietam . . . Shiloh . . . Gettysburg . . . .The men who fought these battles in Union and Confederate uniform left both a collective legacy and their own personal marks on American history. These Civil War soldiers bequeathed to posterity many traces of their lives and their military struggles in journals, remembrances, and personal accounts.

In Regimental Histories of the American Civil War, UMI® preserves items of historical interest accumulated during and after the war: regimental rosters, transportation documents, honor rolls and casualty statistics, promotion and court martial documents, memoranda, and home addresses of veterans. Infantry, artillery, and cavalry divisions are covered.

The collection also contains personal and family papers and records, diaries, memoirs, biographical sketches, burial records, prisoner of war accounts, regimental reunion speeches, photographs, maps, and illustrations.

These records provide genealogists and Civil War historians with clues for tracing the movements of soldiers and their families during and after the war and give perspective to the evolution of the military conflict. The material begins in 1861 with early regimental recruitments and spans battles, negotiations, and the post-war lives of soldiers.

The collection was filmed at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. The Carlisle Barracks holdings include materials originally gathered by The U.S. Army War College, the National War College, and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, as well as materials donated by individuals.

Titles filmed in Regimental Histories of the American Civil War are previously unpublished works or materials published before 1915 and cover a variety of topics. The criterion for selection of these materials is based on C.E. Dornbusch's Military Bibliography of the Civil War. A sampling of titles follows.

• History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865
• History of the New Hampshire Surgeons in the War of the Rebellion, (1906)
• Chronological List of the Laws of New York Relating to the War of the Rebellion and Veterans of That War, 1861-1910
• Lincoln's Body Guard, the Union Light Guard of Ohio (1911)
• The Confederate Capital and Hood's Texas Brigade (1894)
• Historical Sketch of the Chatham Artillery During the Confederate Struggle for Independence (1867)
• In Camp and Battle with the Washington Artillery of New Orleans (1874)
• Mosby's Rangers: A Record of the Operations of the Forty-Third Battalion Virginia Cavalry (1876)

Local Historians Regimental Histories of the American Civil War is organized by state groupings to accommodate the research of genealogists and local historians:

Unit 1: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont

Unit 2: Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania

Unit 3: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin

Unit 4: Arkansas, California, Colorado. District of Colombia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, West Virginia

Unit 5: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia

Unit 6:  Reference Sources: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate Armies and Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion and Oficial Amry register of the volunteer force of the United States Army for the years 1861-1865