Five Interactive Civil War Resources

I won't be able to make it to Gettysburg this summer as the Civil War sesquicentennial festivities reach a fever pitch but I am grateful for the amazing resources that have been produced in the past couple of years. The Civil War is one of those topics that I could spend a whole year teaching and I am always left feeling guilty for not doing it justice crammed into the last few weeks of the school year. My students are currently wrapping up projects that they designed covering a wide variety of topics from the role of animals in the war, the psychology of Civil War reenactors, to the impact of diarrhea (no laughing matter-it killed 34,000 during the war) so I thought I would share five of my favorite interactive resources for learning about the Civil War:

Civil War 150
Resources like this serve as a partial redemption for the Bigfoot, Ancient Aliens, and pawn store garbage put out by the History Channel. This is a visually stunning and interesting infographic that covers a wide range of topics and provides a great place to start exploring the many aspects of the war that you may not have thought about.

Battles and Casualties of the Civil War Map
A stunning map from the Washington Post's Civil War 150 coverage. This is a great conversation starter about the trends over time and geographically that can be seen when the data is put in visual form.

New York Times Disunion Multimedia
A series of timelines, maps, and slideshows about several topics. The NYT's Disunion coverage is very comprehensive but I have found that it is not as student friendly as the coverage done by the Washington Post.

Civil War Animated
This is part of the History Animated series that breaks down battles from several wars and provides an interesting way of learning about strategy and tactics. The Civil War section covers twenty-one battles divided into two theaters of conflict and also has a section about leaders.

Comparing the North and South
This series of animated maps from teachinghistory.org illustrates many of the resources that both sides had going into the war. This year I used it to have students analyze the factors and make a prediction about who had the advantage going into the war. The Union very clearly had an advantage in many areas and they were surprised by the course that the war took in the first few battles. The same organization also created Meet the Commanders.