behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

  • Go Chargers

    I’m sorry to say I’d never heard of Hillsdale College until last week.

    My loss.

    In south-central Michigan, Hillsdale was a hotbed of liberal thought, abolitionism, and Unionist sentiment in mid-19th Century America.

    Because of its dedication to the principle of equality, Hillsdale became an early force for the abolition of slavery and for the education of black students; in fact, blacks were admitted immediately after the 1844 founding. The College became the second in the nation to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women …

    … Because of its early crusade against slavery, its role in helping to found the Republican party in Jackson in 1854 (President Edmund Fairfield was a leading founder of the party), and its location on the first railroad to pass through Michigan to Chicago, Hillsdale College was a natural site for more than two dozen nationally recognized speakers in the antebellum and Civil War eras … Frederick Douglass, Edward Everett, Governor Austin Blair, Senator Zachariah Chandler, Senator Charles Sumner, Carl Schurz, Wendell Phillips, Senator Lyman Trumbull, Owen Lovejoy, and William Lloyd Garrison …

    I’m guessing this tradition, those speakers, and the political bent of the school administration fired-up the students. In 1861, shortly after Fort Sumter, a great number of them enlisted, many in the 4th Michigan Infantry. By the end of the War more than 400 students had served – reportedly a higher proportion of the student body than any other Northern school save West Point. Half were commissioned officers. Among them also were 4 Medal of Honor recipients and 2 general officers. 60 of them gave their lives.

    M.A. Luce
    M.A. Luce

    It was one of Hillsdale’s MoH winners that twigged me to the school and its Civil War history. Moses A. Luce‘s name came up when I was researching his commanding officer in the 4th Michigan at Antietam, Colonel Jonathan W. Childs. Luce was later awarded the Medal of Honor [citation] for retrieving and returning with a badly wounded fellow Sergeant – and Hillsdale man – under fire near Spottsylvania Courthouse in 1864. (more…)

  • Problems in Digital History (Intro)

    Dr Dick Hamming
    If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you’ll do important work
    –R. W. Hamming

    William Turkel has taken Dr Dick Hamming’s challenge*, elegantly condensed by Paul Graham as

    What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?

    and begun to apply it to his view of the field of history. Dr Turkel asserts that “questions raised by digital history are some of the most important that we [historians] face”.

    I don’t know enough to say that these are the most important questions in the field of History, but they’re of keen interest to me. I thought I’d use the ‘thinking out loud’ mode of this blog and walk through some of these questions from my own perspective.

    But I need to look at this methodically–I’m not the intuitive type. I propose to work through the following steps:

    1. Scope: define Digital History (DH), what it is and what it isn’t;
    2. Goals: specify the purpose for DH – what do we expect to be able to do in or with it;
    3. Requirements: identify the environmental, technical and other prerequisites for DH to achieve the goals;
    4. Obstacles: identify the apparent roadblocks to the goals;
    5. Best Practices: survey existing or planned DH strategies and approaches, evaluate their potential and effectiveness, and look for gaps and lessons-learned;
    6. Targets: select specific problems (meeting requirements, overcoming obstacles) for personal attack based on my skills and interest;
    7. Strategy: build a plan to focus efforts on the targets and produce results
    8. Feedback: execute the strategy, periodically review steps 1-6 against results, and revise the Plan accordingly.

    I’ll explore each of these stages in further posts here. Just now, though, I should be finishing another map, hacking through the backyard jungle, working out, washing the dog …

    Next: Problems in Digital History 1 (scope)
    ______________

    *See a 1986 Hamming presentation containing the “challenging” question paraphrased here. Hamming photo above from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews.

  • Fishel: Secret War for the Union

    As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been reading Edwin C. Fishel’s The Secret War for the Union : The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). In particular, I was hoping to gain some insight into how General McClellan arrived at the strength figures he used for General Lee’s forces in Maryland in 1862.

    Fishel book cover

    I’m about halfway through, just past The Battle, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish.

    This is one dry read. You’ve got to be truly dedicated to slog through it. It is a book which could have used a strong editor. I’d say 1/2 to 2/3 of the text is redundant or otherwise unnecessary. There is little structure – the book has been one seemingly endless, chronological string of anectodes and factoids.

    There are gems of new and important discovery, but they play hard-to-get. I’m probably going to miss many by not staying to the end.

    That aside, how did McClellan come to a grossly inflated figure for the size of the army facing his at Sharpsburg?

    All by himself. (more…)

  • Opening new territory to exploration

    For some time now, maybe the last year or two, I’ve felt too closely focused on the events of one day, 17th September 1862. Not that there isn’t a lifetime’s work yet to be done, or that I’ve done much more than nibble at it, but obviously the Battle of Antietam didn’t spontaneously erupt out of the ground. It is surrounded on all sides – in time, geography, and event – by an ocean of context.

    I’ve not entirely ignored the ocean, but haven’t paid it the attention it probably deserves.

    So I’ve jumped out of the comfortable boat (a dingy, in this analogy) into the water. I’m not going too far really, only expanding the scope of my research and the website to include the duration of the Maryland Campaign. The period of roughly 4 through 20 September.

    I have some reservations.

    I worry that AotW will become wider than deep, a trait that would reduce it’s value. There are plenty of survey and CliffNotes versions of history online already. Collection of information in detail beyond the standard and the obvious is my goal at AotW.

    I worry also that by expanding the scope, I’m diluting the effort. There’s so much yet to learn and document about the battle, and only so many hours (years) in which to do it.

    I’ll just have to work with this for a while and see how it goes.

    McClelln enters Frederick City

    My first new project is mapping the motion of the military units on the Campaign. To do this, I’m building a new series of theater-scale maps, one per day. The physical context to Antietam.

    As I have been plotting units, though, I’m finding there are far more of them than I’d read of previously, and the neat orders of battle with which I’m familiar are of less and less help. Local militia, orphaned cavalry detachments, signalmen, state troops; not to mention rear-area logistics, supply, and communications points.

    New and exciting territory, but I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

  • TV feeds the Web

    I was interested to see a large spike in the number of visitors to AotW between about 6 and 9pm eastern time yesterday. Not too surprising, I guess. This coincides roughly with the History Channel Antietam film airing.

    We typically only see about 200 people all day on a Sunday. Yesterday we got 1,100.

    AotW stat graph, GoogleAnalytics

    The majority of these people came from Google searches. Only 3 were referred from the link to us on the HC website about the film series. What does this say about how (these) people use the web?

    I can guess that many Googled “antietam” before the TV show to get some background on the battle, and that’s how they found us. I’m inclined to use Google that way myself: like a giant, ever-ready reference source.

    How about you?

    [I know our visitor stats aren’t terribly impressive. It’s the delta that jumps out here.]