Here’s your chance to make history. More than 15,000 encoded messages from the Civil War (1861-65), including 100 sent by President Lincoln himself, were recently uploaded to research site Zooniverse, where anyone can help decipher them. During the war, Lincoln and his staff sent telegrams to Union battlefield commanders using a complex system of codes to confuse Confederate troops who tried to intercept the messages. After the war, a Union army employee took the telegrams and code books home to New Jersey, where they sat for nearly a century and a half before being discovered in a wooden trunk in 2008. With the public’s help in decoding them, historians are excited at the prospect of reading Lincoln’s secret directives. “I’m optimistic they’ll break the codes,” says Paul Quigley of Virginia Tech University. “The power of crowdsourcing can be formidable.”