Picturing America, in an initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings examples from the many different genres of American art into the classroom. The program provides new and interesting pathways for students to understand American history. In addition to the resource book, the website also offers several additional resources for teachers looking to incorporate the program into their lesson plans.

One of the lesson plans available, “Homer’s Civil War Veteran: Battlefield to Wheat Field,” draws on both visual and written primary sources. Aimed at those in middle school (grades six through eight), the first activity has students compare and contrast Winslow Homer’s painting, The Veteran in a New Field, with Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg 1863. The second has students read a selection from Civil War Captain James Wren’s diary concerning his experience at the Second Battle of Bull Run/Battle of Second Manassas. Finally, the third encourages students to make connections between all three activities, asking what the anonymous veteran in Homer’s painting might be thinking and why. The activities are easily adaptable to individual classroom needs and are creative enough to capture students’ interests.

The National Park Service boasts an intricate online archive containing regimental information on soldiers and sailors on both sides of the Civil War. Over 6.3 million servicemen can be looked up by name, regiment, or battle via an easy-to-use search engine. One can also look up by state the total amount of soldiers that have been archived.  The site also links to academic projects such as Howard University’s  Black Sailors Research Project.

Along with the individual soldiers, the online archive includes over 4,000 Union and Confederate regiments with links to 364 principal battles that took place during the conflict.

This site is one of the best online resources for anyone looking to find information on a specific soldier or sailor that took part in the Civil War. In combination with the millions of documents pertaining to their regiments and actions,  this site deserves a look regardless of the topic.

This section of the “History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications” website is a great resource on the first transatlantic cable in 1858. The site offers lots of information, but the best are the transcripts and images from publications such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Newspapers provided readers in 1858 with detailed accounts on the progress of the cable’s construction and the celebrations that took place in cities after the first official message was sent. “Wherever the news penetrated there was a public jubilee” and, according to the Illustrated London News, “the most thorough and systematic display of popular joy took place” in New York City. While the cable stopped working after only a few days, it marked an important first step.

While my last post was on House Divided’s “zoomable” maps , we also have almost all of the maps from Mitchell’s 1857 atlas available. This includes all the US states and territories as well as countries and major cities from around the world. For example, check out the maps of Africa, Asia, Australia, the Carribean, Europe, England, Jerusalem, London, the Middle East, and South America. These maps can help students see how those in the 19th century saw the world that they lived in.

As this is Geography Awareness Week, I thought I would highlight some of the zoomable maps available on House Divided. Some of these maps provide bird-eyes view of various towns and cities – including Alton, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Harrisburg, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Washington D.C. In the Springfield map, you can look for Abraham Lincoln’s house (# 29 on the map). Other maps provide nice overviews of coastlines, such as Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Virginia. House Divided also has zoomable maps of battlefields, including several of Gettysburg. Click on “Zoomify” at the top right of a map in House Divided in order to view it as a zoomable map.

After John Brown’s attack in October 1859 on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the United States Senate launched an investigation that became known as the Mason Committee. Yet when this committee released its findings in the summer of 1860, many regarded its efforts as ineffective. “Supporters of both sides were…heavily armed” in the visitor galleries of Congress and, as historian David Reynolds explains, “the Mason Committee knew it had to handle the Harpers Ferry matter with kid gloves.” House Divided has some material available on this committee, including an editorial originally published in the Ohio State Journal. This paper summed up the problem with the investigation in a single sentence – “The man who knew every thing was not summoned, and the man [who] knew nothing was imprisoned.”

Approaching the topic of slavery can be difficult, especially at the elementary school level when these issues might be discussed for the first time. Posted by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Slave Narratives: Constructing U.S. History Through Analyzing Primary Sources” offers a helpful classroom solution. Students from third to fifth grade read and explore a selection of narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, after which they evaluate and respond to those sources.

The lesson plan gives several strategies for teachers and the class to review and summarize the narratives in accordance to their needs. In addition, “Slave Narratives” introduces primary sources in the context of a story, before asking students to assess the veracity of the testimony.  In a very real sense the students are “doing” history and hopefully fostering an interest at the same time.

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 University of Virginia Library has an old exhibit on Southern women in the Civil War that is still accessible online.  This exhibit is very well organized into categories that represent major concerns that occupied women on the home front before, during, and after the war.  Under each category, the narrative is presented using a variety of primary sources.  Most of the sources are letters and diaries, which are summarized using important excerpts.   Some sections also make use of photographs or popular cards of the time.  The originals of all of the primary sources are  available as a scanned image on the website.  The format of the exhibit is straight-forward and easy to understand, and it tells the story of women during this time period in a concise and very effective way.  It would be easy for teachers to present one or more of these topics to a classroom using the primary documents selected here as a resource.

“The Matthew Brady Bunch: Civil War Newspapers” is a series of lesson activities that ultimately has students produce their own newspaper articles on different aspects of the Civil War as a larger class project. Created by Amy Donnelly and Elizabeth Ridgway for American Memory, the project is intended for students in the seventh grade, though it can easily be adapted. The activities require students to use a selection of the Library of Congress’ collection of Civil War photographs, first to analyze the primary sources before choosing one for their article. Eventually the goal is for students to produce a website, or an online archive, for their “newspaper”.

Meant to take place over several days (possibly a week), the project can be modified to suit individual class needs. One example of such a modification would make the project interdisciplinary, in conjunction with English class. The “Matthew Brady Bunch” project acts as a good way to end a unit on the Civil War, allowing a class to cover a wide range of events, people, or places. In addition, the project requires students to work with primary sources, develop research skills, and improve writing skills.