Letters to loved ones – whether written neatly in ink by candlelight during the Civil War, tapped out by telegraph during World War II or sent via e-mail from a modern-day desert – add another dimension to the plain, hard facts of history. But historians can’t help but wonder what will happen to the notes now jotted in an e-mail, instant message, blog or twitter. What will happen to the war letters of today? Just as important as those handwritten pages we can handle and hold, they make history personal. We share a few letters here, from across the generations.
Words O
nce, those letters were intimate, a note between a husband and wife, a daughter and father, a mother and son. Today,
38|February/March • 2009
e-mails often replace handwritten letters, and Web chats trump both. And with the advent of military blogs, service men and women can share their experiences with the entire online world directly from the battlefield.
Yet there is a common thread linking
war letters of the past with those of the present. They provide a lifeline to home for the soldiers who are away and a bit of comfort to those who wait for them. That has not changed.
For generations, the soldier’s story has been told in letters home By Nomee Landis
from the war
