Discover the Future of Studying the Past
Civil War Governors of Kentucky: Early Access

The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) is a freely-accessible online collection of historical documents associated with the chief executives of the state, 1860-1865.

Yet CWGK is about far more than the five governors. It is about reconstructing the lost lives and voices of tens of thousands of Kentuckians who interacted with the office of the governor during the war years. The diverse and largely unknown lives of the people captured in the CWGK documents—generals and politicians, prostitutes and plantation mistresses, free African American professionals and “contraband” refugees—as well as the social, economic, political, and geographic networks they allow us to visualize and understand, are the ultimate prizes for CWGK. The project will make an estimated 40,000 documents and a populated network of hundreds of thousands of identified people, places, and institutions available to researchers across the globe, prompting historians to ask new and far-reaching historiographical questions through this digital research platform.