Digital Collections

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Indiana Governor Oliver P.Morton's staff recorded thousands of the governor's incoming andoutgoing telegrams in small, bound books. The governor and his staffcommunicated by telegraph with the highest and most prominentgovernment and military leaders in the North, including PresidentAbraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Researchers willfind many uses of these messages. Historians studying politics andmilitary planning at the highest levels of federal and state governmentduring the Civil War will find many important communications. Personsstudying the organization and actions of Indiana volunteer regimentsand batteries will gain useful insights. Biographers, local historians,and genealogists will all learn much from consulting these records.

This digital collection celebrates the works of James Whitcomb Riley and is a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers in Indiana, throughout the country, and beyond. Livin' the life of Riley provides access to manuscripts, personal letters, photographs, early edition books, and artifacts that represent the Hoosier Poet. This is a collaborative effort between the Hancock Public Library, the Riley Old Home Society, the James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home, and IU Indianapolis University Library and was made possible by an LSTA grant.

In 1915 Jessie Groves arrived in Indianapolis at the age of 21 to take a position as the Night Supervisor at Long Hospital on the campus of the fledgling Indiana University School of Medicine. She spent the rest of her nursing career at the IU Medical Center, retiring in the 1950s as the Operating Room Supervisor for both Long and Riley Hospitals. The collection consists mainly of candid photographs taken by Jessie over the course of her four decades at the Medical Center and an oral history completed when she was 83 years old looking back on her career.

This collection is a photographic documentary of scenes and places from the perspective of Neil E. Matthew, a professor of the Herron School of Art at IUPUI. He was a painter first while an undergraduate at Arizona State University. He then studied photography under Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University. His photography, as described by its creator, is "the painter as photographic tourist." It is straight representational photography of the landscape and buildings seen during his travels.