Ranney Letters

Primary Sources

I have talked about the Ranney Letters on this blog before, but I don’t think I have ever posted them all. I’m now playing with the idea of adding more of them to my US History Web Text. I call it American History As Told By Contemporaries and focus mostly on primary sources. So why not include most or all of the sources that I found and transcribed, and that are available nowhere else? It’s up to me, of course, to contextualize them and explain why and how they show us things about the American past that would otherwise be more difficult to see. But I think they do.

I made this video in June 2022 when I was a University professor and lived full-time in northern Minnesota. I still teach in Higher Ed, but more contingently. And I split my time between “up north” and other places. But it was fun, reviewing this video, to see my old office cats running around in the background.

I’ll post a whole series of Ranney Letters videos this spring and summer. There are over five dozen of these letters between the eight brothers and one sister that made up the family, over about sixty years. It’s a unique glimpse into the lives of regular Yankees in the 19th century. Stay tuned. And if you like it, subscribe or buy me a coffee.