Instructify

November 19, 2010

With this coming April marking the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, expect media outlets to feature extra coverage of this trying time in United States history. The New York Times is leading the charge with a new blog called Disunion.

The project’s premise is simple, yet brilliant. Disunion reports on the Civil War as if in real time, so the post for today would reflect the events of November 19, 1860. With a staff of writers that includes professional historians, university professors, and an ex-presidential speechwriter, the stories are top quality. Here’s a sample from one of my favorite entries:

In 1860, a cub reporter named Samuel R. Weed scored the assignment of a lifetime when his St. Louis newspaper sent him to spend Election Day with the man who might become America’s president. Surprisingly, no one else had thought of it, and Weed arrived to find a relaxed Abraham Lincoln, greeting him “as calmly and as amiably as if he had started on a picnic.”

For us teachers, one of the best things about Disunion is that it includes primary sources from the Civil War era (the post quoted above featured the article written by Samuel R. Weed). Finding good teaching documents is always a challenge, and the Disunion people do the work for us by providing them on an almost daily basis.

I’ve never been a Civil War fanatic and you certainly won’t see me out in fields reenacting battles, but I’m already hooked on Disunion. Use it to inspire your teaching or give it to your students as supplemental reading.

Disunion

Read milestone documents from American history at Our Documents

Take your class to the Lincoln Memorial Interactive