Previous Scholarship

This website is one of very few projects about the 48 American soldiers who served in Egypt, and it is the only project that is digital. There are a handful of sources that I used to inform myself about the topic and to direct my approach with this project.

The Blue and the Gray on the Nile is the most official and complete text about the group of soldiers. Written by William B. Hesseltine and Hazel C. Wolf in 1961, the book explores who exactly went to Egypt and their motives for doing so. I consider this book to be the cornerstone of this topic as the authors were even in contact with a descendant of one of the soldiers. Their bibliography is impressive, including archives and literature published by the soldiers. What I find most helpful is the emphasis on the Americans’ work in Egypt, not only as soldiers but also as explorers and engineers. Hesseltine and Wolf also provide important Civil War context at the beginning of the book as well. However, the scope of their book is made narrow by their limited access to manuscripts that have only recently been made available or digitized. Additionally, their work is inaccurate in some places; for instance, there is a photograph of Henry Goslee Prout that is mislabeled as Erastus Sparrow Purdy. As a result, any project that uses this book as its sole source subsequently furthers this mix up.

Another written source that I found helpful is a 1987 dissertation from Portland State University. Written by Robin Joy Love Buxton, “The American efforts to modernize the Egyptian Army under Khedive Ismail” is a continuation of Hesseltine and Wolf’s book. Buxton never developed this dissertation into a book, but the work exists online. What I found most helpful about this source is her annotated bibliography, which was essentially a list of publications written by the soldiers. I used this list to track down all of the articles that are here on the site.

All of the materials found on this website came from an array of different sources. I found many photographs from the Library of Congress Website, and other public websites like FindAGrave or even Wikipedia. Other photographs came from university archives, such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill collection on Samuel Henry Lockett, as well as the American Civil War Museum database. I found some of the above-mentioned publications on JSTOR, American Periodicals, Internet Archive, Google Books, and through my university library. For William Wing Loring’s account book, I directly contacted the University of Florida libraries to request a scan of the manuscript.

Now that things are becoming more digitized, there is more that I have access to that my forerunners did not. My aim for this digital project is to create the most complete, correct, and comprehensive source on the 48 soldiers.