In the past several years, scholars have conducted a great deal of valuable research about different aspects of the Civil War, enriching our contemporary understanding of this conflict. This wealth of scholarship can, at times, feel overwhelming to students. The Essential Civil War Curriculum, an ongoing project of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech functions as an easily...

The ExploreKY History site is a bit of a "twofer" as it contains both a full-fledged interactive site about Kentucky history and an iPhone application. The site notes that it "takes the stories behind our community-driven historical markers, adds related items from the Kentucky Historical Society and combines it into a historical tour of our Commonwealth." The historical markers are crafted by the...

For educators, students, and persons looking for information about any period in American history will find the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Web site an excellent resource containing thousands of helpful materials ranging from the colonial period to the present day. The site is divided into three main sections: Resources by Period, Resources by Topic, and the Reference Room. Users...

Shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, Union veterans formed the Grand Army of the Republic, or the G.A.R. Through the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age, the G.A.R. was a powerful organization that lobbied the federal government for federal and state Soldiers Homes for invalids, advocated for the creation of Memorial Day, and also provided support for soldier reunions. This digital...

From the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab comes Hidden Patterns of the Civil War, a collection of "interrelated projects on the sectional crisis, slavery, and emancipation during the Civil War era, with a particular emphasis on the histories of the city of Richmond and the state of Virginia." These projects are organized into two categories, Text and Maps. In Text, visitors will...

Johnson's Island in Ohio is arguably the state's best known Civil War landmark. In 1861, the U.S. Army leased 40 cleared acres of the island in order to create a prisoner of war depot. The depot was in operation from 1862 to 1865, when the site began new life as an agricultural station. Recently, David Bush and some of his archaeology colleagues began an excavation on the site in order to locate...

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a Civil War general, governor of Maine, and the president of Bowdoin College. Visitors interested in learning about Chamberlain's life from a spatial perspective should check out the "Biographical Map" feature accessible from the link near the top left hand side of the page. Using Google Maps or Google Earth, visitors can choose a place on the map that was a point...

The sesquicentennial of the American Civil War is being celebrated by museums, historical organizations, and of course, the Smithsonian Institution. Along with lectures, talks, and so on, they are also working on a few new digital collections. One such collection is the Liljenquist Family Collection, which contains over 700 ambrotype and tintype photographs. This remarkable collection of...

For many people, Massachusetts' role in the Civil War may be summed up by the impressive sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that dominates one corner of the Boston Common. It depicts Colonel Robert Shaw leading the 54th Regiment (which was made up of African Americans) down Beacon Street in 1863 before they went off to battle in South Carolina. Those persons looking to learn more about the role...

Mining the Dispatch is a digital humanities project by Robert K. Nelson, an American Studies Scholar who heads the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab. In this project, Nelson uses a variety of digital tools (including MALLET software for text analysis and Google Charts API for data visualization) to analyze the Richmond Daily Dispatch newspaper, which was in circulation during the U.S....