Editorial Notes Add a link from our almanac to your website Additional Information
By the time Ft. Sumter, South Carolina had been fired upon and surrendered, the Missouri-Kansas border area had already endured six years of Border War activity relating to Kansas statehood, slavery and land claims. Still to come were four years of Civil War.
This almanac primarily outlines the political and military events in the geographical area focused on in WindingRiver.com. In some cases entries have been made for events outside this geographic area when those events seemed to weigh heavily on issues and events related to our editorial focus.
Political, social and military events are inevitably intertwined. An effort has been made to list all Civil War events - both political and military – but just as inevitably, some items will have been overlooked. We hope that organizations will add additional information to this almanac by providing articles or links to their own website with this, new information.
Entries into this almanac are deliberately short and to the point. Again, we hope that others will expand this information by providing links to information on their website. At the same time, we will not be including links to national projects or ‘wiki-articles’ easily available through internet search engines.
It is also hoped that these entries might spur research by college and high school students. We will work with teachers and professors to add those articles to our archive or link to those articles.
The most important source for this Almanac is the 127-volume "War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies." This study was collected and published by the United States Government beginning in 1880. It includes battle reports and correspondence relating to the events included in this Almanac.
Also very important to this Almanac is "The Annals of Kansas" by Daniel W. Wilder, published in 1886. Other sources consulted include such local newspapers as have survived, various county histories and numerous more-recent works of scholarship concerning the period.
The Almanac will be published on the website with an initial installment of January – May, 1861. Succeeding entries will be published monthly throughout the Civil War anniversary.
As mentioned on the Civil War Almanac notes and comments page, our entries are brief and focused primarily on events in the editorial area covered by our website, Northeast Kansas and Northwest Missouri. We have invited groups in the area to add links to this almanac to give additional details on these entries.
Editorial Notes
Capitalization of political and military organizations -- We have capitalized references to proper nouns, e.g., Missouri Volunteer Militia or Missouri State Guard. Shortened versions of proper nouns are also capitalized when referring to official organizations or military units, e.g., Federal or Union when referring to troops of the U.S. government, or Confederate when referring to troops representing the Confederate States of America. We have not capitalized terms that refer to political movements, e.g., rebels, guerillas, secessionists or raiders.
Cities and Counties -- For clarity, counties are listed in parentheses following the mention of a city. Because most action occurs in Missouri counties those listings do not include the reference of Missouri, but the listings do include reference to Kansas when the entry deals with a Kansas county. The exception is in the case of counties that have the same names in both Kansas and Missouri, notably Johnson County.
Slaves, escaped slaves and freedmen -- Various events refer to 'blacks' having been captured or freed during skirmishes. We have left those references to 'blacks' in place. It seems an accurate reflection of the historical narrative of 1861 -- and, in most cases we simply don't know whether 'blacks' captured by one side or another were slaves, escaped slaves or freedmen. As important, we do not want to lessen the achievement that Missouri's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1865, and the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gave in giving the name African-American to people held so long as second-class citizens.
Quoted Works -- Quoted works will follow the standards of "The Associated Press Stylebook" including, the allowance that, "Quotation marks are not required in full texts, condensed texts or textual excerpts." In the case of the latter, WindingRiver.com will place the text in italics to indicate it is a quote and reference the source for the quote.
Quoted works will be reprinted as close to the original format as possible, including sentence and paragraph structure. However, line breaks and page breaks may differ from the original due to the configuration of the web page.
We may indicate with a [sic] notation or [bracketed correction], sentence structure or spelling which differs from current standards and could be confused with a reproduction error on our part.
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Additional Information
