This blog community is designed for teachers and students who are interested in nineteenth-century American history, especially the period before, during and after the Civil War. This sectional era in American history, roughly 1840 to 1880, is the current focus of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College, an interdisciplinary effort that aims to help make this turbulent and complicated story more accessible within the nation’s classrooms. We are at the beginning of a multi-year effort to build innovative web-based resources and to host intensive K-12 teacher training workshops on various topics from the period, especially in connection with a series of pivotal anniversaries –such as Abraham Lincoln’s Bicentennial (2009) or the 150th anniversary of the Civil War (2011-2015). We hope members of this community will join us in identifying breaking news, the latest scholarship, cool web sites, evocative field trips, useful lesson plans, powerful primary sources, rich images and any other important developments related to the period. We also hope this space might provide a forum for posing questions, exchanging views and for debating interpretations. Though we call it “Blog Divided,” however, we don’t really expect this virtual space to re-fight the Civil War. Instead, we hope that all the members of the community are united in their passion for trying to explore and understand the issues and events that divided an earlier generation of Americans and quite nearly destroyed the republic.
