The Scholl Center staff is currently at work on an exhibition in
partnership with, and with major funding from, the Terra
Foundation for American Art. The exhibition, opening at the
Newberry in autumn 2013, will explore the ways in which lives on
the home front were altered by the Civil War. It will juxtapose
an outstanding group of paintings from the Terra Foundation for
American Art collections with a wealth of material drawn from
the Newberry, including popular prints, illustrated newspapers,
photographs, maps, magazines, sheet music, fashion plates,
letters, diaries, advertisements, and other ephemera. Among the
Newberry’s abundance of material on the American Civil War is a
deep collection of sheet music, such as that on the top left,
published in 1862 by the famed Chicago-based firm Root and Cady.
This imaginative cover illustration displays a gang of
determined women successfully fighting back a group of
Confederate soldiers—the “seceshs”—armed with nothing but common
household items, including a scald