0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 5/12)

Surprisingly, very little work has focused on Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. The most thorough overviews of Washington during the Civil War are Margaret Leech's Reveille in Washington (New York: Harper&Brothers, 1941) and Ernest Furgurson's Freedom Rising (New York: Knopf, 2004). Both studies have merit, though neither one offers a scholarly analysis of the capital's crucial role in the emancipation movement nor an account of the war's impact on Washington’s long-term development. Social historians tend to stop before 1861, or pick up after 1865, or only study the War years—but in all these approaches Washington in the War years isn't folded into a larger account of change. One may speculate that the reason so little scholarship has focused on the city during this period is that the forms of scholarship previously available could not adequately represent the complexity of the place; its incredible change; the multiple perspectives; the interplay of literary, political, military, and social elements; and the sheer amount of uncollected information. Further, traditional forms of scholarship have been slow to deal with one of the most important aspects of Washington during the War: spatiality. Here and elsewhere I am indebted to good advice from Brett Barney, Amanda Gailey, Wendy Katz, Elizabeth Lorang, Vanessa Steinroetter, and William G. Thomas, III. Understanding the city’s transformation requires the visualization of complex change. Such a visualization, linked with numerical data, images and narrative accounts, is exactly what a digital platform can provide.

We are gathering uncollected factual data about an urban space that served as the center both of the Union’s War effort and of a divided nation, where hospitals arose overnight, wounded men moved in and out, “contraband camps” of fugitive slaves developed, and temporary shelters were erected to house the city’s swelling population. To study the significant changes in—even transformation of—the U.S. capital during the Civil War, the project team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln began by building databases to advance interpretation and mapping of the city. We are of course awash in information, and the choices of what to record and what to prioritize have been more difficult than with the Whitman Archive . We focused first on the physical and institutional contours of change: hospitals, fortifications, and theaters, all of which increased dramatically during and because of the War, as well as churches, significant government buildings, contraband camps, police stations, post offices, tram lines, railroad lines and stations, taverns, hotels, and other identifiable businesses (including bawdy houses). In contemporary directories, African American churches were distinctly identified, and so provide a means of determining those areas of the city where African Americans built some of their own institutions, including numerous private schools before public education was available to them. From the start, the city had racial contours, and our project allows us to place slaves and freed people on the map in the spaces in which they lived, worked, worshiped and acted before and after the Emancipation Proclamation.