American Civil War

The American Civil War is our first topic for 2016.  The war ran from 1861 to 1865. Over 600,000 troops were killed, making it the most deadly of all American wars.

This page lists a bunch of resources both printed and available on websites. Not surprisingly, the topic has massive coverage in websites. The page is under constant updating. There’s also a Glossary of some things, places and people here.

Overview
A good, quick(ish), overview can be watched at the Civil War Trust site. The video is in seven separate parts, and by definition has to leave out a lot of crucial material, but is still the fastest way (other than the animated timeline, below) to get a quick understanding:
Explore The Civil War.

Timelines
There are lots of timelines on the web, some very detailed indeed! Here are a few to get started:

The Smithsonian‘s Civil War collections are immense, and the timeline is excellent, and very detailed:  http://www.civilwar.si.edu/timeline.html

An even more detailed version is The Civil War Trust’s  day-by-day account:
http://www.civilwar.org/150th-anniversary/this-day-in-the-civil-war.html

There’s a nice YouTube video (7min) that provides an animated timeline: American Civil War Timeline 1861-1865

Wikipedia (of course) has a huge amount of material, and a strong timeline of the events leading up to the Civil War

Major Websites
As ever, why not start with the Wikipedia articles? The link goes to the main page, but there are scores of extras, and more or less every battle has its own entry.

The Library of Congress has a huge range of material, and the starting point for exploring it all is here.

Links
There are quite a few pages with lots of links to all sorts of topics. A good place to start is:
Index of Civil War Information Available on the Internet.
Also useful is the set of pages which form the original home of the previous page of links:
Shotgun’s Home of the American Civil War. The pages on Strategy and Tactics are  very helpful.
Also try: The Best Sites For Learning About The American Civil War.

If you use Pinterest, there are quite a few boards specialising in the Civil War, but you can also use this query/search to see the latest links.

Books
Again, hundreds to choose from. The most frequently cited ones are: (links to both Amazon and an indication of whether Cumbria Libraries has a copy – it is not strong on the American Civil War)

Battle Cry of Freedom, James M McPherson, 1990, many editions (Amazon; amazingly, for one of the most cited book on the war,  Cumbria Libraries doesn’t have a copy)
DK The American Civil War A Visual History, 2015 (Amazon) A rather nice book, with, obviously, lots of great photos.
The Library Of Congress Illustrated Timeline Of The Civil War, Margaret Wagner, 2011 (Amazon)
The American Civil War, John Keegan, 2009, (Amazon, Cumbria Library has two copies) A purely military history, by all accounts, but benefiting from a more dispassionate view.
A Short History of the Civil War: Ordeal by Fire, Fletcher Pratt, Dover, originally published in 1935, then revised in 1948 ( Amazon,  no Cumbria Libraries copy). Still reckoned to be one of the best single volume histories and written with journalistic brio. The book that’s been on my shelf for twenty years, waiting to be read!
The Civil War, A New One Volume History, Harry Hansen, many editions, 1961. (Amazon, no Cumbria Libraries copy). Dense, long, but well reviewed.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin, 2009 (Amazon, Cumbria Libraries has no copies-it’s lost its only one!) The book Spielberg’s film, Lincoln, was based on. It’s a 963 page tome, but has had great reviews, though it is not a detailed history of the war, but concentrates on Lincoln’s political activities.
A World On Fire, Amanda Foreman (of Georgiana fame), 2010 (Amazon, Cumbria Libraries has at least eight copies) is a  more recent entrant . The book is ostensibly about the British involvement, both political and material, but is also a detailed history of the war itself. Another weighty tome, at 816 pages, before notes, it’s not a quick read, but she writes well, with lots of detail and the use of contemporary British sources. As one reviewer said, good on tactics and anecdote, not so good on strategy. The paperback has a new strapline of Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, which seems to a bit of an exaggeration!
The American Heritage Picture History of The Civil War, Bruce Catton, 1960 (Amazon, no copies in Cumbria Libraries). Bruce Catton is a much lauded writer on the Civil War, with about a dozen books to his name. This is a very splendid book, with a great selection of drawings, photographs and maps of campaigns. In effectively 300 double page spreads, each element of the war is succinctly dealt with. Hard to come by cheaply.

The four books in the Osprey series on the Civil War, originally Essential Histories are available as Kindle books, The Guide To… series, at £1.15 each, as:
The American Civil War (1): The War In The East 1861- May 1863
The American Civil War (2): The War In The West 1861- July 1863
The American Civil War (3): The War In The East 1863-1865
The American Civil War (4): The War In The West 1863 -1865
Four hundred plus pages of very good material for £4.60. And the maps are excellent, really excellent!

Individual parts of the War, ‘campaigns’, are dealt with in a series of short books, with really good, clear maps, in the The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Civil War Commemorative Brochures series. They are all downloadable as PDFs here:
The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Civil War Commemorative Brochures
Recommended. There are sixteen of them, at around 50-60 pages each, so in the end it amounts to a huge amount of material!

A trio of overall review articles:
The Best Civil War Books A review article in The Daily Beast
The top 12 Civil War books ever written From Salon
The Essentials: Six Books on the Civil War From Smithsonian.com

Photographs
The American Civil War was the first in which photography really came into its own. There are thousands of photographs and the Library of Congress has, naturally, a significant collection: the starting point is here. But there are hundreds of other sites around the web, and only a few can be noted here. For the sheer quality of the images, these three pages from The Atlantic magazine take some beating: The Civil War (the link is to the first of the pages).

For more sources and background, the Center for Civil War Photography is a good starting place.
Mathew Brady (1823-1896) was one of the most prolific photographers of the period, and there are two pages of pictures of each sides generals which are worth a look: Union and Confererate (not as many). You have to hover the mouse over the images to get the names.

Video
Everyone raves about The Civil War a documentary on PBS by Ken Burns. It has just run on the new PBS channel on Sky 534/Freesat 106. Not sure when it’ll run again. But it is available as a boxed set: Amazon (£35 – 6 DVDs—maybe we should buy it jointly?). (For the adventurous, if you use a VPN and use a US location , then YouTube has the individual episodes at $4.99).

Also on YouTube, a 52 minute talking heads-style documentary, mostly discussion, but quite interesting: American Civil War – The Complete History

The History.com website has a whole set of short videos on parts of the war. There are also some longer History Channel programmes on YouTube:
The March to the Sea, November – December, 1864

There’s also a 27 lecture series  on YouTube, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, from the Yale Open Course series, with David Blight. The videos are just of his lectures from 2008, and visually less than compelling, but the content and verbal delivery I found to be very good.  The course home page is here, and the lecture series is here:  YouTube play list. The homepage for the course also has a link to a zip file containing course materials, and buried in there are transcripts of the lectures, if you don’t want to listen/view (the lectures are around 50 minutes apiece). The transcripts are in html format and don’t have an extension, so a bit of editing work is necessary to display them in a browser…

David Blight also has a useful overview article in The Atlantic on the occasion of the 150th anniversary: The Civil War Isn’t Over.

Maps
Oh, so many great maps! And not so many good atlases. The current best of the bunch seems to be:
 The Civil War: The Story of the War with Maps, M David Detweiler,  Stackpole, 2015 (Amazon, no Cumbria Libraries copy…) Gets quite good reviews, but is mostly military.

But the online resources are vast and wonderful to explore: both old and new. The Library of Congress has a great section of maps of all sorts. Start here at the Collection page.

There’s also a great page on Mapping the Civil War: as with lots of things, cartography got a major boost from all the activity, and there are good in-depth articles on all aspects. One famous cartographer was Jed Hotchkiss, and the Library of Congress has a separate collection here.

The Civil War Trust has a combined quick history and animated map of the progress of the war. The video and animation does a great job of ‘doing’ the war in about 30 minutes. Well worth the time. The Civil War Trust has really good video and maps of just about the whole war and campaigns. Start here.

A nice overview of the entire war is a copy of the National Geographic map overlaid on Google Maps, which is zoomable to good detail.

There’s a large set of both overall and individual battle maps at Maps Etc.

And a rather fun animated map of the progress of the war over time, on YouTube.

I have been using this map (large to load), found via Pinterest (below), as my starter to get states, places and other stuff properly in context.

And a quite nice, large, graphic mostly on the lead-up to the war, at Visually.

There’s a useful map of battlefields from ESRI  here. It can operate as a timeline, too.

Music
There is quite a lot of music that is associated with the Civil War, and this YouTube video of a BBC programme from way back in 1962 has both tunes and a narrative of the war. Its 45 minutes long, in audio, and the voices and style are very early ’60s but rather nice:
The Blue And The Gray: The BBC’s Songs Of The Civil War

Blogs
Can’t really do better than start with this list: Top Ten Civil War Blogs. Lots to pursue if you want.

The New York Times ran a blog for four years covering the events of 150 years previous, and the main parts of this are available as Disunion, a wonderfully eclectic set of pieces by a huge range of authors, and well worth dipping into: beware of getting sucked in! Use the timeline at the top to avoid huge scrolling pages. Two useful posts are from Professor John Ashworth, of Nottingham University,  on What the South Got Wrong, and What the North Got Wrong.

A great set of short articles, with lots of links to other pieces, and particularly videos of talks by experts, at Student of the American Civil War. Again, hard to resist getting distracted.

Battles (this section will grow as time goes on)
In order, I hope:
Fort Sumter, April 1861, the engagement that ensured a war:

Other Resources
If you’d like a rather random approach, then there are a few Pinterest pages that can provide amusement and a constantly changing set of links:
American Civil War
Civil War
Civil War Photos
This Pinterest link provides a changing set of maps, mostly of the American Civil War, but other civil wars get a look in too!