Kenneth Price uses Walt Whitman s life, writings, and government work to reevaluate the writer and the nation s capital. Drawing on an expanded Whitman corpus, including nearly 3,000 Whitman documents the author discovered at the National Archives, Price demonstrates that the power of Whitman s Civil War and Reconstruction writing more fully emerges from his intimate knowledge of the capital city, its bureaucracies, and its tumultuous postwar history. In this National Archives video, Walt Whitman Documents Discovered in the National Archives, Professor Price describes his remarkable discovery.
The Walt Whitman Archive, funded in part by the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), is an electronic research and teaching tool that provides easy access to Whitman’s vast work that include fiction, notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, marginalia, and voluminous journalistic articles. The Whitman Archive is the most compreh