This is a guide for amateur historians, graduate students, or professionally-trained historians who want to know how to read a Civil War letter. The correspondence of the American Civil War is easy to find, but often not easy to understand. This guide helps readers learn about historical context, additional research, and helpful approaches to the process of the understanding Civil War era correspondence. The how-to suggestions are interspersed with anecdotes from the author's personal research in Civil War sources. The resulting book is a starting methodological guide for workers at local historical societies, state-level archives, and researchers of all experience levels. If you are interested in doing your own primary source research on the American Civil War, this is the perfect source. If you are done with reading the historical research of other scholars and want to do some for yourself, start with this practical guide from historian Dr. Greg Jones.