The Freckled Historian

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D.

Currently serving as the Digital Humanities (DH) Assistant Professor of Practice/Librarian at the University of South Dakota (USD), I develop and manage digital documentary editions, that preserve and increase the accessibility of our state and nation’s history, while bringing valuable DH training and experience to K-12 and college students. Additionally, I teach creative, cutting-edge courses in U.S. history and DH at USD.

I am also a war & society historian specializing in the American Civil War era, and serve as the Managing Director of Society of Civil War Historians. My current research analyzes how Union veterans and their families commemorated the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi West, finding that western Unionists constructed a place-specific narrative of the war to bolster their vision of western expansion.

History & Digital Humanities Scholarship

Selected Publications

  • [Major Samuel K. Thompson and unidentified soldiers of the 39th U.S. Infantry posed with a 10" Rodman cannon at Fort Massachusetts, Mississippi], Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.39544.

    “Black Experiences Documented in Civil War & Reconstruction-era Mississippi Governors’ Papers"

    Co-authored with Susannah J. Ural and published in Enslaved: Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 5, no. 3 (2024): 48–58.

    This article & its corresponding dataset dataset focus on four subject tags that relate directly to African American experiences that can be found in our much larger collection of over 20,000 documents from Mississippi's Civil War and Reconstruction-era governors' papers. By selecting subject tags relating to African American experiences, users can explore cooccurrences (or closely related subject tags) to that term and narrow the data by region, date, or other terms such as the U.S. Army.

  • “’The Defenders, Protectors and Builders of Our State’: The Colonial Legacy of Union Civil War Commemorations in Kansas, 1870s–1910s”

    Published in Journal of War & Society 42, no. 3 (August 2023): 233–250

    This article examines how white Kansan Union veterans and their families commemorated the American Civil War throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Kansans’ post-war narratives, including a monument erected to Gen. James B. McPherson in 1917, constructed a legacy of the war that asserted the Union war effort preserved the trans-Mississippi West for free-labour and celebrated veteran-pioneers for fulfilling the promise of a free-labour American empire by migrating to Kansas post-war. Distinct from their eastern counterparts, Kansan Union veterans and their families wielded collective memories of the Civil War as a tool of colonisation in the American West.

  • “We are now at Gettysburg”: Gender and Place in the Iowa Woman’s Relief Corps’ Monument to Jennie Wade”

    Published in Civil War History 68, no. 4 (December 2022): 373–396

    “Jennie” Wade was the only recorded civilian casualty during the Battle of Gettysburg and sister of prominent Iowa Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC) leader, “Georgia” Wade McClellan. Little had been done to memorialize Wade in the thirty-six years since her death because the Gettysburg community believed she had failed to obey rigid nineteenth-century gender roles. The Iowa WRC, however, enthusiastically commemorated Wade to bring recognition to Iowa women’s work for the Union cause and its remembrance. Iowa WRC women’s efforts to commemorate Wade reveal that place and region impacted how northerners decided who was deemed worthy of commemoration in the Civil War North.

  • “’Iowa Excelled Them All’: Iowa Local Ladies’ Aid Societies Relief on the Civil War Frontier, 1861–1865”

    Published in Middle West Review 3, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 49–70

    Throughout the American Civil War, Iowan women performed relief work for soldiers and their families on the home front in Local Ladies’ Aid Societies. Iowan women believed their wartime benevolent work augmented their relationship with the national government and served as evidence of their greater patriotism and loyalty to the cause. As frontier residents Iowans shared dual loyalties to supporting the Union and developing their state. Although their efforts were often similar to eastern women’s, women in aid societies in Iowa viewed the added burden of frontier life as a testament to their loyalty and patriotism.

The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi

With NEH and NHPRC funding, CWRGM is digitizing and editing over 20,000 documents written to Mississippi’s Governors during the American Civil War and Reconstruction (late-1859–1878). This rich collection of resources—with key-word search-ability, transcription, subject tagging, annotation, and educator and scholarly resources—is freely available online at CWRGM.org

Contact Me

Dr. Lindsey R. Peterson

  • Office 321C, I.D. Weeks Library, 414 E. Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069

  • Office Phone: 605-658-3399

  • Office Email: Lindsey <dot> R <dot> Peterson @USD.edu

Black and white photograph of Grand Army of the Republic Department of Kansas on parade
Photograph of Peterson in PhD graduation regalia at University of Southern Mississippi (2023)
Photograph of Peterson advising a group of National History Day students on digital research (2024)
Photograph of Peterson (center) working with a USD undergraduate and graduate student in the USD Archives.
Aerial photograph of quilt stitched together from Woman's Relief Corps convention ribbon badges
Photograph of Peterson and Ural at Southern Miss PhD graduation (2023)
Photograph of Peterson and Ural at the Society for Military History annual meeting (2022)
Black and white photograph of Iowa Daughters of Union veterans dressed in white and displaying a large American flag
Photograph of Peterson and Ural Dale Center for the Study of War and Society event (2018)
Photograph of Kyle Zelner awarding Peterson the Phi Alpha Theta award at Southern Miss (2017)
Black and white photograph of four men laying the capstone of the Sergeant Floyd monument in Sioux City, Iowa
Photograph of Peterson and Ural Dale Center for the Study of War and Society event (2016)
Photograph of Peterson in PhD graduation regalia at University of Southern Mississippi (2023)
Black and white photograph of locals attending the 1892 unveiling of the "Defenders" monument in Minnesota
Photograph of Peterson displaying the Outstanding Part Time Faculty award she received from the University of Sioux Falls, South Dakota (2022)
Photograph of Peterson and Hackemer following their roundtable presentation at the Northern Great Plains History Conference (2023)
Black and white photograph of Haskell Institute band, an American Indian boarding school in Kansas
Photograph of Peterson and Feis at University of South Dakota's Undergraduate History conference (2014)
Photograph of Peterson and fellow panelists at the Association of Documentary Editing annual meeting (2023)
Black and white postcard of the unveiling of the Union Soldiers Monument in Grafton, North Dakota
Photograph of Peterson presenting how to use digital archives to revise their National History Day theses in Iowa (2024)
Photograph of Peterson and Hackemer at her Masters graduation ceremony at the University of South Dakota (2015)
Black and white photograph of western Grand Army of the Republic comrades
Photograph of Peterson teaching a University of South Dakota student to digitally annotate historical texts (2023)
Photograph of Peterson and Hackemer celebrating Peterson's PhD graduation (2023)
Photograph of Peterson working with a USD graduate student on using Python to map CWRGM subject tags.
Black and white postcard featuring the Marion Courthouse in Columbia, Mississippi
Photograph of Peterson and fellow classmate with their Buena Vista University History Dept. advisors (2023)
Photograph of Peterson leading a workshop of National History Day students focused on researching digitized archival documents (2022)
Color postcard of Jennie Wade Monument in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Photograph of Peterson with the 2023–2024 class and leaders of the Billie Sutton Leadership Institute (2023)
Photograph of Peterson teaching a University of South Dakota student to navigate transcription software (2024)