Category: News & Updates

  • Join Civil War Bluejackets on Transcription Tuesday, 31 January 2023!

    Join Civil War Bluejackets on Transcription Tuesday, 31 January 2023!

    Every year, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine holds a major online transcription event entitled “Transcription Tuesday.” It calls on those interested in family and social history to support a number of not-for-profit transcription projects by transcribing some of their available documents (read more about Transcription Tuesday here). This year is the seventh annual

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  • Civil War Bluejackets Workshop: The Irish Experience

    Civil War Bluejackets Workshop: The Irish Experience

    Last week we joined the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany for our latest Bluejackets workshop. As well as explaining what the project is about and demonstrating how volunteers can use Zooniverse, the talk also explored what naval records can tell us about Irish immigrants- and shared some of their stories. The talk is now

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  • Celebrating Thanksgiving on a Union Monitor

    Celebrating Thanksgiving on a Union Monitor

    As Thanksgiving approaches, we wanted to take a look at how U.S. sailors during the American Civil War celebrated the holiday. Thanksgiving was an important day for immigrants as well as for native-born Americans during the Civil War, as it provided them with an opportunity to embrace one of the flagship dates in their new

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  • Research Update: A First Look at Civil War Sailor’s Occupations

    Research Update: A First Look at Civil War Sailor’s Occupations

    Thanks to everyone who is working so hard to complete classifications on Civil War Bluejackets. It is still very early days, but our Information Science team have begun to have a look at some of the early data coming in from your efforts on “A” vessel muster sheets. Ultimately, we are hoping that we will

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  • PRESS RELEASE: MAJOR NEW PROJECT TO REVEAL NEW INSIGHTS INTO 19TH CENTURY SAILORS IN THE U.S. NAVY

    PRESS RELEASE: MAJOR NEW PROJECT TO REVEAL NEW INSIGHTS INTO 19TH CENTURY SAILORS IN THE U.S. NAVY

    A new project will help tell the stories of sailors in the American Civil War in ways never before possible. The “Civil War Bluejackets” Project—so named because of the distinctive uniform worn by U.S. Civil War sailors—is a collaboration between historians at the Northumbria University, information and data scientists at the University of Sheffield andView…

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  • Volunteer for Civil War Bluejackets Beta Testing!

    Volunteer for Civil War Bluejackets Beta Testing!

    We are moving closer and closer to the full launch of the transcription phase of Civil War Bluejackets, where we will be seeking Citizen Scientists to assist us in transcribing all the Civil War Muster Rolls of the U.S. Navy on the Zooniverse platform. We have just entered the Beta Testing phase on Zooniverse, where

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  • Civil War Bluejackets Features in Special Issue of Crossfire

    Civil War Bluejackets Features in Special Issue of Crossfire

    The Civil War Bluejackets team recently received an invitation from the American Civil War Roundtable UK to guest edit a special edition of their magazine, Crossfire. The main theme of the issue was the Irish experience of the conflict, but we took the opportunity to highlight the Bluejackets project through both the introduction and in

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  • Big News for Civil War Bluejackets!

    Professor David Gleeson has been awarded a major Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK for Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy, 1861-1865 (CWB) to go well beyond this initial pilot study and transcribe all the Civil War US Navy Muster rolls. In collaboration with University of

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