The Battle of Antietam was a key battle during the Civil War that took place on September 17, 1862. After the engagement, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary announcement of the emancipation proclamation. The National Park Service website on Antietam has a number of great resources, including historic photographs by Alexander Gardner, Captain James Hope’s paintings, and a gallery of antique postcards. Teachers can find curriculum materials as well – these include lesson plans, a primary sources packet, worksheets, and scavenger hunts. Visitors can also find a nice timeline, and details on the Army of the Potomac and Army of Northern Virginia. Historyanimated.com, a non-profit educational foundation, has a great battle animation of Antietam. Antietam on the Web also provides a number of great resources, including links to all 315 of the commanders’ After-Action Reports published in the Official Records.

This article from the Washington Post describes “Discovering the Civil War,” a new exhibit that will open at the National Archives in Washington D.C. on Friday. This exhibit, as reporter Michael E. Ruane explains, “seeks to explore more of the little-known aspects of the battle and glimpse some of the dimmer corners of the conflict that remade the country and that so many Americans think they know so well.” You can watch the exhibit teaser on YouTube and learn more about this exhibit here.

Update – Read the Washington Post‘s review of this exhibit.

Tulane University has put together a detailed description of the opening volleys of the Civil War. The site breaks the description down into nine specific parts that provide lengthy summaries as well as biographies while detailing decisions that were made and orders that were given both before and after the battle.

The most effective facet of this site are the calenders provided for each section. The calenders point out  days in which events such as letters, missions, and reports that took place during the specific section. This sheer amount of information provided by Tulane is a great place to go if you want to know anything about the fort that started the Civil War.

While one can always visit Vicksburg National Military Park, they also have a great exhibit online. Even those who have already been to the park should take a look. The site offers short essays on different aspects of the Vicksburg Siege as well as related images. In addition, the exhibit uses the U.S.S. Cairo as a way to teach visitors about river warfare. One can take a virtual tour of the U.S.S. Cairo as well as learn more about life aboard the ship. Teachers may want to check out the National Park Service’s “Teaching with Museum Collections” for several lesson plans that incorporate material in the Vicksburg exhibit.

The New York Times recently published a review of two new exhibits on John Brown – one from the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond and another from the New York Historical Society. (The New York Historical Society’s exhibit draws on material from the Gilder Lehrman Institute and some of it is online, as I noted in previous post). Both exhibits may tell a similar story, but they have different perspectives on Brown. Edward Rothstein explains that the New York exhibit “suggests” that “Brown’s legacy…finally found fruition in the 1960s civil rights movement.” As for the Richmond exhibit, the focus is Brown’s decision to sue violence as a means to end slavery. “We hear the clamor of the debate more clearly” as Rothstein notes that this exhibit asks visitors to consider whether “an individual [has] the right to carry out violent acts based on conscience.” While different views on Brown are not surprising, it is interesting to see them reflected in exhibits open at the same time.

The New York Historical Society recently opened “Lincoln and New York,” a new exhibit that aims to “fully trace the evolution of Lincoln’s relationship” with the state. The exhibit includes not only Lincoln’s visits to New York, such as for his Cooper Union address in February 1860, but also explores the impact of his administration’s policies during the Civil War. In addition, the material on display highlights the extent of serious political opposition that Lincoln could face even in northern states. “We see New York’s version of the Civil War being fought using words, ideas, images and, at least during the 1863 Draft Riots, a fair amount of blood, with Lincoln as the battles’ nexus,” as the New York Times’ Edward Rothstein explains in his review. If you can’t make it to the exhibit (which runs through March 25, 2010), be sure to check out their interactive exhibit online.

Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center is an invaluable resource for studying the life and culture of American women. While the collection covers a broad range of topics on all aspects of women’s history, its strength is in Southern women and there are a great deal of resources pertaining specifically to the 19th century. This page features an extensive list of the primary sources that the collection has relating to domestic and social life in the 19th century.  Any one of these collections of family correspondence and diary entries could be useful in understanding the cultural and domestic context to the Civil War, but many have not yet been archived online. The resources that can be accessed online now are found here. Other collections relating explicitly to the Civil War period can be found on the subject guides page. Hopefully the Center will continue to provide more digital resources so that the documents in this collection can be accessed by a wider audience.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a new online exhibit on John Brown. The exhibit covers Brown’s life in the 1850s, the attack on Harpers Ferry, and Brown’s legacy. While only a few documents are available right now, they will add more material every month through March 2010.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute has a number of other online exhibits, including one on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (co-produced by the House Divided Project).

A number of organizations in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland have organized events for the sesquicentennial anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. These include the Virginia Historical Society’s exhibit “The Portent: John Brown’s Raid in American Memory,” a reenactment of the march from the Kennedy Farm in Maryland to Harpers Ferry, and an academic symposium. The full list of events schedule for Oct – Dec 2009 is available here. (Registration is required for some of the events). In addition, the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park will commemorate Brown’s raid with a wide range of activities from Oct. 16-18. Check out the full schedule here. Teachers may want to check out this list of resources, which include links to lesson plans.

The Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, which remains closed as it plans for moving into a new building, has announced that items from their collection will be on display at several institutions in Pennsylvania. Tentative plans call for the museum to partner with the Gettysburg National Park Visitors Center, the National Constitution Center, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. In addition, the museum will participate in an exhibit that will visit locations throughout the country as part of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Hopefully the museum will be able to reopen before 2014, but in the meantime this plan seems like the best option. Check out their website for online exhibits and more information.