A companion site to the six-hour "American Experience" PBS documentary, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided. Organized into five topical sections—Partisan Politics; Slavery & Freedom; A Rising Nation; Americans at War; and A Woman's World—the site offers more than 30 textual documents—including book excerpts, newspaper articles, poems, lectures, letters, and diaries. Visitors will also find more than 50 photographs, maps, and political cartoons. Essays of approximately 500 words each and nine videos address such subjects as the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, defenses for slavery, "wage slavery" in the North, African-Americans in the North, developments in technology, women's rights, and literary women.

Includes works by well-known authors, such as Frederick Douglass, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, George Fitzhugh, and Edmund Ruffin, in addition to letters by ordinary soldiers, slaves, and nurses. Also provides previously published essays of 6,000-7,000 words by historians James McPherson and R. J. M. Blackett on aspects of the press; a political timeline; a teacher's guide; a program transcript; an annotated list of 16 related sites; and a bibliography of approximately 150 titles. Valuable as an introduction for students to important social, political, and cultural aspects of life in antebellum America and during the Civil War.