The Vicksburg Daily Times

Reconstruction Era Newspaper from Vicksburg, Mississippi

The Georgetown Election--The Negro at the Ballot-Box, Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, March 16, 1867, Massachusetts Historical Society

Contents: About the Collection | Source Materials | Historical Context | Thematic Organization | About This Project | Tech

About the Collection

The Vicksburg Daily Times Digital Library showcases digitized newspaper issues covering news primarily impacting Mississippi and the broader South in the year 1867. These papers contain important information revealing Southern attitudes toward African American suffrage, the Reconstruction Act and ensuing military occupation of the South, as well as the Lost Cause mythology embraced by many Southerners.

Source Materials

The Vicksburg Daily Times came to the Dolph Briscoe American Center for American History through the acquisition of the Natchez Trace Collection. The collection was initially funded by wealthy Confederate veteran George W. Littlefield, who incidentally was an adherent to the Southern Lost Cause mentality expressed in this library’s materials. The original purpose of the collection – which was to effectively whitewash Southern history – has significantly changed since its inception. This digital library aims to honestly reckon with the violent legacy of Mississippi through its interpretation of the collection, motivated by a desire to assist humanities researchers analyzing the postwar South.

Historical Context

Published during Reconstruction, The Vicksburg Daily Times provides a window into the political, social, and economic conditions of post-Civil War Mississippi. Vicksburg, having been the site of a crucial Civil War siege in 1863, was a significant location during this transformative period in American history.

Thematic Organization

This collection is organized around three key themes of Reconstruction: the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, African American Suffrage, and Southern Lost Cause Mentality. Visit our Themes page to explore scholarly analysis and browse newspapers by theme.

About This Project

This digital collection was created by students of the Digital Libraries course at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. The students received 40 digitized issues of The Vicksburg Daily Times and generated metadata for each issue. 15 of the 40 issues were carefully selected to present on this website according to the selected three key themes.

Harper's Weekly illustration depicting a uniformed figure representing the Freedmen's Bureau at center holding out his hand to stop a group of white men from advancing on a group of Black men, with both groups holding weapons and a United States flag hanging from a building in the background
The Freedmen's Bureau, A.R. Waud, Harper's Weekly, July 1968, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Stanley Turkel's Collection of Reconstruction Era Materials

OCR and AI Tools

OCR tools (ABBYY FineReader) were used to generate text from the historic newspaper images. OCR generated text of historic newspapers is never 100% accurate due to the quality of the digitized image and the technology used.

AI tools (Claude Code Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, GPT-5) were used in the construction of this website. There was a human-in-the-loop verifying the integrity of outputs at every step of the process.

Credits

Special thanks to:

Digital exhibit created by:

Historical illustration showing African American men voting in New Orleans during Reconstruction, with voters lined up at a ballot box
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder

This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.

Using the CollectionBuilder-CSV template and the static website generator Jekyll, this project creates an engaging interface to explore driven by metadata.

CollectionBuilder