HOW TO USE
Click on menu (upper left) for a chronological listing of place marks arranged in five layers (Origins, 1861, 1862, 1863, and “1864 and Beyond”) in order to find coverage of the period roughly from 1787-1877 with a concentration on the war itself. There are two types of place marks: blue-and-gold markers indicating political or social events, and red “explosion” symbols, indicating violent or military events. Each placemark contains a gallery of images or embedded videos, with short snippets of text from Louis Masur’s The Civil War: A Concise History (Oxford, 2011), followed by links to the full text of related primary sources. In some cases, there are also links to relevant secondary or digital resources.
ABOUT THE MAP
This map, “Concise Civil War Era,” exists on Google Maps as part of the growing arsenal of multi-media maps from the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. Most of these maps use short snippets or text excerpts from primary and secondary sources to help anchor custom-made place marks that typically also include images, embedded videos and links to various types of supporting materials. In this case, the map owes its greatest debt to Louis Masur’s The Civil War: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2011), but here is a list of some of the other excellent online resources (besides the research engine at the House Divided Project) that have helped to provide materials for this compact visualization of the Civil War era:
Avalon Project at Yale Law School
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
HarpWeek / Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Library of Congress / American Memory Project
Mr. Betts’s Class (YouTube.edu)
National Archives / Our Documents
University of California-Santa Barbara / American Presidency Project
University of Maryland / Freedmen & Southern Society Project
University of North Carolina / Documenting the American South
University of Virginia / Uncle Tom’s Cabin