Interactive Civil War maps and digital storytelling tools

It’s always a great day when I get to spend time with people who love talking history. That was my day yesterday. Strategies, resources, what works, what doesn’t.

Good times.

Part of the time involved what I call “play time.” Most teachers have a limited time during a typical day to just play around – browse for resources, chat about scope and sequence, argue about Kennedy’s response to Soviet missiles in Cuba.

You know. The part of the day when real professional learning happens.

It was during this period of sharing and browsing that a teacher found an awesome site that she passed on to me.

History Geek Week Day Three: Teaching with American Art and Portraits

I walked in late and I love this session already. Three people from several Smithsonian art museums are highlighting some of the ways teachers can use artwork and portraits as teaching tools. And the stuff they’re sharing is pretty sweet. The content is focused on the Civil War era but you could do this kind of thing with just about any period.

You can find most of it online at their Civil War with Art exhibit. Be sure to also check out  their Teachers Guide page with stuff on a variety of topics including Reconstruction, Native Americans, and Manifest Destiny.

A couple of sample activities:

Lincoln movie and White House floor plans

There’s more to this weekend than simply watching the Kansas City Chiefs go 1-9.

It’s Lincoln weekend. As in the movie Lincoln. As in Daniel Day Lewis as Honest Abe pushing through the 13th amendment Lincoln. You know . . . the movie for History geeks Lincoln.

It’s a big deal. Well . . . it’s a big deal for me. I’ve always been a Lincoln fan. One of the greatest American presidents. I love the Civil War period and, wait for it . . . I was born on February 12, the same birth date as Lincoln.

So. A big deal.

Obviously loving the story and the content of the movie but I’m also interested in the sidebar sorts of stuff. And I’ve run across a variety of interesting things. One of the most interesting for me is a Lincoln website that showcases that floor plan and history of the Lincoln White House.

Visualizing Emancipation

We’re deep into the third day of our Teaching American History summer session and are busy uncovering all sorts of handy resources and materials. Part of what we’ve been learning is that African Americans of the 1800s played a huge part in their own gradual emancipation.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights and supports that sort of thinking:

Edward L. Ayers, a historian and president of the University of Richmond, calls the emancipation of slaves during the Civil War “the least-understood social transformation in American history.” A new interactive map he helped build shows that emancipation didn’t occur in one moment, he says, but was “an unfolding,” happening from the very first years of the war to the very last. And, he adds, it happened because of African Americans, not merely for them, or to them.

Titled Visualizing Emancipation, this interactive map is an ongoing project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that sheds light on when and where men and women became free in the Civil War South. It tells the complex story of emancipation by mapping documentary evidence of black men and women’s activities – using official military correspondence, newspapers, and wartime letters and diaries – alongside the movements of Union regiments and the shifting legal boundaries of slavery.

A very cool Web 2.0 way of helping kids see that there was way more to the Emancipation story than just Lincoln, his Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment.

Letters of Note – “To My Old Master”

As an unabashed primary documents geek, I’m always looking for online and print resources that I can share with kids and teachers. A few years ago, I ran across a great primary document site and still use it to find incredibly weird, interesting, and engaging goodies.

Titled Letters of Note, the site

is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.

It seems a bit like a Wikipedia version of the National Archives or the Library of Congress if you and I were in charge. Basically just a guy who collects and confirms interesting tidbits of history. (Read more about the creator and his inspiration here.)

You can find tons of great stuff here. A group of us is sitting around today talking about ways to engage kids in the Civil War and Reconstruction and sharing great strategies. And Letters of Note comes through with an awesome letter from 1865.

Dictated by a former slave named Jourdan Anderson to his former master, the letter is a response to the master’s request that Anderson return and work for him following the Civil War. (Go here for version printed in August 22, 1865 New York Daily Tribune. Then here for an “update” of the Anderson family – using census data.)

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated.

Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

The number of things you can do with this specific document is the classroom is almost endless. What sorts of things are over at Letters of Note?

• The odd request by Elvis Presley to Richard Nixon asking to become “Federal Agent at Large”
• A slightly creepy note from Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton
• A humorous letter from Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons
• An important letter from Jackie Robinson to Dwight Eisenhower asking for help in the Civil Rights movement

So be sure to head over and check it out. Even if you’re not a primary source geek.

Books I’m reading and other assorted Civil War stuff

It’s been all Civil War books and stuff since last spring.

Partly because it’s the 150th anniversary of the war and partly because the Teaching American History grant I’m helping to lead is focusing on the war this year, I’ve been on a Civil War kick much of the year.

So if you’re not a Civil War fan, don’t think you’ll ever be a Civil War fan, don’t know anyone who’s a Civil War fan or don’t teach the Civil War, you have my permission to skip out and bang around somewhere else.

Maybe here.

Or here.

But if you are a fan, here ya go:

Books

1861: The Civil War Awakening
This book takes you from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Started the Civil War
Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown’s uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
The standard for the period, this Pulitzer Prize winning book recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War including the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. From there it moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself–the battles, the strategic maneuvering by each side, the politics, and the personalities. The latest edition has a new Afterword by the author, James McPherson.

America Aflame: How The Civil War Created a Nation
Where past scholars have described the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America’s greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second Great Awakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
The author embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America’s greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war, and takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox.

Apps

The Civil War Today
150 years after the start of the American Civil War, HISTORY presents The Civil War Today. For less than one penny per day you can experience the war as it unfolded, one day at a time, with daily updates that let you live the events in “real-time” over the course of four years. It has photos, diaries, newspaper articles, maps and more.

Civil War Battle Apps
Customized battlefield touring apps, with integrated maps and always-on GPS, ensure that you know exactly where you are on the battlefield. Walk where the 20th Maine, 33rd Virginia, or 1st Texas fought – the units and your location are right on the map. Even if you can’t get there, awesome info, videos and maps make these very sweet.

History 3D: Civil War
A time machine, right in your hands. For the first time ever on the iPad, you will see two dozen 3D photos taken during the Civil War, using cameras with two or four lenses, by legends such as Mathew Brady. Most of them are taken from the original negatives, rather than scanned prints.

Sites

The Civil War (PBS)
Abraham Lincoln Primary Sources (Library of Congress)
Civil War Maps (CivilWar.org)
Letters, Telegrams, and Photographs Illustrating Factors that Affected the Civil War (National Archives)
Civil War Lesson Plans (CivilWar.org)
Civil War Letters (PBS)
The Civil War: A Nation Divided (Discovery Channel)
The Valley of the Shadow (University of Virginia)