The Civil War is the most popular subject in American history and there are thousands of collectors of Civil War memorabilia. John A. McAllister is the godfather of them all. McAllister was an indefatigable collector, seemingly stationed at the business end of every printing press in town. Beginning in 2006, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the William Penn Foundation, staff at the Library Company of Philadelphia disassembled the scrapbooks, re-housed the collection, added records to our online catalog, and created finding aids, making the collection much more accessible to researchers.
Debuted in 2011.
Resources
John A. McAllister’s Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front Online Exhibition
McAllister Civil War Scrapbooks Collections
American Song Sheets, Slip Ballads and Poetical Broadsides Collection
