The George T. Harrell Health Sciences Library, Penn State Hershey, will host a National Library of Medicine traveling exhibit that explores the experiences of disabled Civil War veterans. "Life and Limb: The Toll of the American Civil War" will be on display from Feb. 13 to March 21, and will feature images, Civil War ephemera and books. It is hosted in partnership with The Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine and the Department of Humanities, and coincides with the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Two lectures will be held in conjunction with the exhibition. At noon March 8, in the Junker Auditorium, Susan Rosenvold will present "Clara Barton and Battlefield Medicine." Rosenvold is the superintendent of the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, D.C. Her lecture will shed light on how the approach to battlefield medicine during the Civil War was challenged by advocates, including Barton, who saw a need for better and faster medical care during and after battles.

When the Civil War broke out with the bombardment of Fort Sumter April 12, 1861, Penn State had just won a prolonged legislative battle for a $50,000 appropriation to complete the construction of Old Main. The entire operation of the Farmers' High School (as Penn State was then called) was to be housed in this single structure that had been only one third completed when the first students arrived in February 1859. News of Fort Sumter's surrender changed the mood of the 88 students and five professors then on campus from satisfaction over the legislative victory to confused excitement. President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to serve in the Union army and Governor Andrew Curtin's immediate response had the students in a patriotic uproar to enlist, which was aggressively quieted by College President Evan Pugh.

"Penn State during the Civil War, 1861-1865," a Penn State University Archives exhibit is on display, now through Jan. 13, 2012, in the Hintz Alumni Center, Robb Hall, on Penn State's University Park campus.

Popular media of television and movies shape many perceptions about the Civil War. A new exhibit in the University Libraries, "The Civil War from the Stacks," presents recent scholarship that gives a more robust view of the war and society and corrects some common misperceptions. Too often popular portrayals overlook many of the very ideas that motivated the generation that fought the war. According to renowned Civil War historian Gary Gallagher, "The most influential perspective for the Civil War generation is almost entirely absent from the Civil War stories being told today."

One hundred sixty years ago, 10 years before the start of the Civil War, Pennsylvanians played a pivotal role in resisting the Fugitive Slave Act, entering a national debate over slavery's future in the republic. A new project, "The People's Contest: a Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project" at http://peoplescontest.psu.edu/ online, aims to advance scholarship on the experiences of ordinary northerners during a period of extraordinary conflict, a lesser understood aspect of the Civil War era. The website chronicles Pennsylvania's history from 1851, marked by the bloody Christiana fugitive slave riot, to 1874, when the state adopted a new constitution after the Civil War.

The University Libraries recently were awarded funds to digitize more key historical Pennsylvanian newspapers, as part of a wider effort by the National Endowment for the Humanities aimed at increasing public access to such materials. Under phase two of the Pennsylvania Digital Newspaper Project (PaDNP), Penn State received $393,489 and selection of titles is now under way.