I see that the home office has deployed a new standard web design for National Park sites. The Antietam National Battlefield (ANB) Park is among those with the new look. I’ve not found a formal announcement of the change by either the National Park Service (NPS) or the Park. Don’t know why not – the sites look good. This change seems to have been made between 27 July and 2 August this year. Thanks to Tom Shay for the alert on TalkAntietam.
ANBP homepage
I live in a glass house on the web, so it’s hardly wise to throw stones, but let me introduce you to the new site and how well I think it works. I’ll find an interested party at the Park to send this to, also. FWIW.
I’ve been hearing for at least three years now about a massive overhaul of the Battlefield website and contents. The current offering is no such animal. It’s more structural than content change. (more…)
After playing with the Timeline API last week, and having reasonable success, I thought I’d try another widget this week.
As a result, AotW now has another new feature: a Gazetteer for the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Please go try it and let me know what you think.
AotW Gazetteer screenshot
My gazetteer is an index of towns, structures, and geographic features–about 70 places so far–most often mentioned in the literature of the Campaign. Some are archaic names not found on modern maps, some are just hard to find. All are listed as links below a lovely GoogleMap.
Click a name on the list and we plot and center the location on the map.
I don’t intended this map to supplant the campaign or battle maps already on AotW. But I expect this would be a useful tool for someone trying to follow the action reading a book or other document on the campaign. Or someone planning a trip to the area, and plotting places to see. Or looking at the relationships between two or more points of interest.
Each location is (or will eventually be) tagged with additional information and links to associated events or people. This information is presented as a pop-up window on demand.
The map behaves in the ways you’d expect of a Google Map, so I hope it will be easy, even intuitive, to use.
I have been accumulating geo-data for towns and features in the AotW database for some time now, not knowing exactly how to use it. With the Google Maps API it was a fairly simple leap to put these places on a map. I’d like eventually to make more sophisticated use of both the data and the mapping API, but for now I’m happy with this fairly specific function.
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Techno-comments
The Google Maps API is well documented and supports/is supported by a huge community of developers and other users. There’s plenty of help out there.
I was up most of last Sunday night making all this work. Went round and round and round … the final code looks trivial to me now, but it wasn’t automatic.
Like Perl, there are many ways to code something in Javascript. It turns out, also, that some of the Google calls I needed are “undocumented” and others did not work as I thought they should. Being open to trial-and-error and cribbinglearning from what others have done were key for me here.
I’m not blaming Google or Javascript for my difficulties, per se. I hate Javascript, but it’s me, not it. Google is doing great things in this arena – my thanks to them.
I used PHP code to pull the locations and geo-data from the database and write the Javascript used to invoke the API and its functions. I pass data between the html and the map on the link URLs. A little fat, perhaps, but effective. I tried several other methods. Too hard.
If you view-source on my Javascript, please comment by private email and save me the public embarrassment, won’t you?
I don’t intend to make a habit of simply linking to other blogs, but in this case I hope you’ll let me slide.
As sighted on the latest History Carnival, “Greenman Tim” Abbot has written a thoughtful piece called “Little Mac” Attack: History vs. the Soldier’s View on his Walking the Berkshires blog. Nothing earth-shattering, perhaps, but a different perspective from the average. Almost never a bad thing.
He gives a nice synopsis of the subject:
I have often wondered at the disconnect between the deep affection the Army of the Potomac had for its ill-starred commander and the verdict of history. His men by their own accounts adored him. Lincoln was certain the soldier votes of McClellan’s veterans would cost him re-election in 1864 when “Little Mac” ran on the Democratic ticket. Yet armchair generals and Civil War buffs alike condemn McClellan as a failed and self-promoting army commander who may have been an efficient administrator but who consistently over-estimated his foes and was outgeneraled time and again on the Peninsula.
He quotes from a letter of a Captain Read (of BGen Brooks‘ staff) talking about McClellan’s having been relieved of command of the Army of the Potomac soon after Antietam, in November 1862:
“… It is the feeling in the camp that a deep act of injustice has been done, purely from political motives, and there is a general indignation manifested. The demonstrations of affection with which little “Mac” was received by his troops as he paid them a farewell visit it is beyond the power of pen to describe …”
Later Tim makes a simple statement that also summarizes my own take on General McClellan
I’m reminded to opine by an article in yesterday’s Washington Post which looks at Google’s program to digitize millions of books. There’s been a lot of excitement about this; many people adamantly pro or con.
As a digital historian I’m all for it.
I do the bulk of my initial research on line, followed by work in books, collections, and archives I find from online references. I find both sources and pointers to sources online. A vast collection of books searchable by browser sounds like Nirvana to me.
Beyond simple reference, I can only faintly imagine the amazing things that could be done with this newcorpus literae googlius (apologies to Dr Turkel).
Google would/will make money doing this, of course. Perhaps they’re the Devil. (more…)
I heard it said that there isn’t enough interaction on our blogs. Too few comments. I must admit to you that I’ve had just over 1,100 comments submitted in the last month, and not shown them to you. I apologize. My protective filtering software, by Akismet, has been blocking them.
Let me make this up to the contributors who wanted to say something, but couldn’t. I’ll post their thoughts now. I can do this fairly easily because, remarkably, hundreds of commenters used exactly the same phrases. But then, how many ways are there to compliment a simple blogger?
I'm really impressed!
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and my favorite
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Who wouldn’t appreciate this kind of support from their readers?
I also thank these nice people for submitting all those links and suggestions about pharmaceuticals, intimate relationships, texas hold-em, and extra income. I’m sure these are all valuable references. It’s a shame the filter won’t let them through.
