0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 6/12)

Washington was a chaotic mix of construction and destruction during these years: even as construction work on the Capitol continued, the Confederate army strove to tear it down. While bridges were defended and a ring of forts encircled the city, Washington fostered vibrant life. One of our goals is to develop richly layered, interactive maps that will assist in the analysis of change over time as structures grew and the population swelled and developed a new ethnic and racial mix. We want to be able to ask questions such as: how quickly did the theaters grow in number from one to eleven during the war? Where were the contraband camps located? What portions of the city were disproportionately affected by disease and crime? We expect to be able to answer such questions in part visually via dynamic maps. And we expect, in turn, our visualizations to generate new questions.

The project will also join the emerging historical debate over the ethical and humanitarian character of the Civil War. A growing school of historical commentators, joined most recently by the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, the President of Harvard University, has begun approaching the social and cultural impact of the Civil War from the perspective of ethics and patriotism. Catalyzed in part by current controversies over how best to balance legitimate national interests against the lives and liberties of American citizens, this scholarly movement is re-examining the moral choices made by a host of actors—including supporters and critics of the War in both the Union and the Confederacy—and how those choices reflected and revised prevailing cultural ideals during the nineteenth century. This research asks a fundamental question: how far should a nation go to secure its ideological interests and continued survival? By drawing upon the experiences of the capital and its people, Civil War Washington has the potential to illustrate the ways in which the War altered and took lives, challenged Americans’ conceptions of patriotism, sacrifice, duty, and compassion, and, overall, stretched the tolerance of the nation’s political, social, moral, and humanitarian fabric to unprecedented limits. The substance of this paragraph was first drafted by my colleague Kenneth Winkle; I incorporate it here with his permission.

Civil War Washington considers both obscure and renowned people, and in doing so runs counter to the canonical underpinnings of traditional editing. At the moment, we are seeking grant support for the development of two different aspects of our project: the medical story and the slavery, race, and emancipation story. We expect these two concerns to become core components of Civil War Washington , just as an edition of Whitman’s writing is the core, though not the totality, of the Whitman Archive . Identifying our key concerns helps us determine what we can treat most fully as content and what we treat less fully here as context. Our current effort to study race, slavery, and emancipation in the District illustrates the blending of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Slaves were first freed in Washington, D.C., before the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and it was in the District that the only experiment in compensated emancipation was conducted. The various laws, proclamations, and decisions by political figures deserve close analysis, of course, but we intend to situate these decisions within the living and working conditions of the city itself with its rapidly changing demographics. Here too, we join the efforts of other scholars, who have begun to study self-emancipation efforts in other parts of the nation.