Cornelia Hancock’s Civil War: A Q & A with Caroline Ivanoff

Several years ago, I wrote a book about nurses in the American Civil War. It looked at the story of civil war nurses as a group, told through the experiences of individual women. One of my favorites, was a young Quaker woman named Cornelia Hancock, who made her way to Gettysburg as a volunteer nurse.…

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Helping to Write Women’s History

One of the greatest challenges in writing history is reading handwritten documents from the past. Many times over the last few years I found myself cursing struggling with Sigrid Schultz’s letters.* Her handwriting was not great. Her use of punctuation was erratic. (I blame this on years of writing stories in cablese  and sending telegrams.…

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