For week six, I was unable to attend class. I did all of the week six readings, as well as attempted to consider each of the questions listed on the class website. Since I missed class discussion, I cannot adequately comment on that here. I can, though discuss the use of Zotero and the two secondary sources I discovered there that relate to Galthaar’s article. “Touched with Fire: The Uncommon Soldiers of the Civil War.”

One of the questions for class addressed the importance of secondary sources in constructing the life of our soldiers. The secondary literature that exists on the Civil War is important because it can give a more complete picture of a soldier’s life and can provide more generalized information that extremely focused primary documents, like medical reports and pension affidavits, do not report.

One secondary source I have now saved on Zotero is an article entitled “Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier Christians and the Impact of the War on Their Faith.” My soldier, Wilhelm Kurz, was married in a Christian church and therefore was most likely impacted spiritually by the war. This article gives me an idea of what internal struggles Kurz may have experienced due to his time served in the Confederate Army. If I had only relied on the primary sources from the Blenheim house, all I would know is the name of the church where he was married. The second document I found was from the same EBSCO database and was entitled “‘The Money Matters’ of a Confederate Soldier.” It discussed general pension laws and regulations, the pay of soldiers during the Civil War, both Confederate and Union, and how soldiers went about supporting their families during the war years and after the war. This article provided me with more of a context for Kurz’s numerous pension documents.