Research & Reference Gateway: History - North America

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Logo, Rutger's University Libraries
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This site furnishes hundreds of links to primary and secondary sources on North American history. An eclectic collection, it includes links to library catalogs throughout the world, archival collections, texts, journals, discussion lists, bibliographies, encyclopedias, maps, statistics, book reviews, biographies, curricula, and syllabi. Materials are arranged by subject, period, and document type. Try "History-North America" for the widest variety of vetted sources. Special resource collections include "America in the 1950s," "New Americans: American Immigration History," "The Newark Experience," "U.S. Business History," "U.S. Labor and Working Class History," and "Videos on the U.S. and American Studies."

Gettysburg: Turning Point or a Small Stepping-Stone to Victory?

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photographic print, The hero of Gettysburg, 1863 July, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, LO
Question

It is almost always taught that Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War and that the war was really over for all practical purposes afterwards. Are we in a sense guilty of looking at this backwards as we probably do with most historical events? Was Gettysburg seen at the time as such a terrible loss that the South was then destined to lose the war?

Answer

It would have surprised the tens of thousands of men who found themselves casualties of fighting in 1864 to hear that the Civil War had essentially ended the year before. Indeed, some of the bloodiest fighting of the war (especially during the Overland Campaign in Spring 1864) occurred after July 1863. So the short answer to the first question is yes, we are guilty of looking backwards when we argue that Gettysburg was the decisive moment in the Civil War. Hindsight is a powerful tool and can create great gains for understanding, but it can also warp how we see the past and produce false insights. Viewed contemporaneously, the Civil War (as with most wars) had no single moment that participants could identify as the fulcrum point.

But the war did have several crucial moments visible both at the time and later, that clearly channeled the conflict in different directions. A short list of these moments include Lee's repulse of McClellan's army on the peninsula below Richmond in Spring 1862, the Union victory at Antietam and Lincoln's subsequent issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the simultaneous Union successes of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, the Union capture of Atlanta in Summer 1864, and Lincoln's reelection in November of that year. At all of these moments, events transformed the conflict in fundamental ways. Lincoln's decision to make emancipation a Northern war aim probably marks the single most important shift in the course of the war.

[Gettysburg] marked the fullest and, in some respects first, clear defeat of Lee's army by Union forces.

Therefore, neither side saw Confederate defeat at Gettysburg as the moment that determined Union victory. But there is also no denying that it was a pivotal moment. It marked the fullest and, in some respects first, clear defeat of Lee's army by Union forces. It also did massive damage to the personnel of that army—both enlisted men and officers. That the victory was announced to the nation on July 4 in tandem with news of Vicksburg's capture ensured it would resonate with a special significance regardless of what happened later. In many respects, the final capture of Vicksburg (which had taken Ulysses S. Grant and his men almost six months) was more important—it cleaved the Confederacy in two, restored full control of the Mississippi River to the Union, and demoralized Confederates who had long believed the city to be impregnable. But many more people, foreign and domestic, followed battles in the East, and to many Lee's defeat marked a shift in the war's course. Union soldiers were elated by their victory, leaving the Confederates shamed and chagrined. The challenge was for the Union to follow up and this it failed to do. The Union army followed Lee back into Virginia but there was no major fighting in the region for the remainder of 1863. The next major eastern battle following Gettysburg did not occur until May 1864.

For more information

Gary W. Gallagher, "Lee's Army Has Not Lost Any of Its Prestige: The Impact of Gettysburg on
the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate Home Front," in The Third Day at Gettysburg and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994, 1-30.

A. Wilson Greene, "Meade's Pursuit of Lee: From Gettysburg to Falling Waters," in Gary W.
Gallagher, ed. The Third Day at Gettysburg and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994, 161-201.

Brian Holden Reid. America's Civil War: The Operational Battlefield, 1861-1863. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008.

Stephen W. Sears. Gettysburg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

David McCullough: Americans in Paris

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Video background from The Library of Congress Webcasts site:

"When historian David McCullough announced his intention to write a book about Americans in Paris, his interest was in Americans who went to Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, not, as he observed, 'to make a social splash, but with the ambition to excel. The old world was the new world to them,' says the author. McCullough discusses his latest work, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris."

HERB: Social History for Every Classroom

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Photo, Before-and-After Photograph. . . , War Department, NARA
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HERB consists of three TAH projects, History for All, History Matters, and Our American Democracy, as well as a wide variety of non-TAH collections, primarily related to social history. If you're wondering where the name came from, HERB's namesake is Herbert Gutman, a labor historian and co-founder of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, which has been involved with K-12 education since 1989.

On HERB, you can keyword search for resources such as prints, posters, advertisements, and other artworks; oral history transcripts; statistics; documentary-viewing guides; timelines; activities; worksheets; explanation by historians; letters; songs; and more. From the main page, you can also browse by selecting your time period of interest or a major theme—immigration and migration, civil rights and citizenship, slavery and abolition, work, reading supports, expansion and imperialism, gender and sexuality, Civil War, or social movements.

Search results do not give suggested grade levels for any of the materials, including classroom activities, so be prepared to do some thinking about what might be best for your classroom's collective interests and ability levels.

John Brown's Holy War

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Logo, John Brown's Holy War
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This companion site to the 1999 PBS documentary on John Brown uses special features, a timeline, an interactive map, short biographies and histories, and a teacher's guide to explain the story of Brown's life and times. The site offers special features on the Maryland farmhouse where John Brown assembled his men before their raid on Harpers Ferry, the Harpers Ferry firehouse where Brown's raiders were captured, a history of the famous song "John Brown's Body," and a short essay on Brown's failures as a businessman before he became a radical abolitionist. The timeline traces the major events of Brown's life from 1800 to 1865. An interactive map follows Brown's movements across the country from his birth in 1800 to his execution and burial in 1859. The "People and Events" section features short biographical essays on Brown, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, abolitionist newspaper editor James Redpath, writer Henry David Thoreau, 1859 Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, and "The Secret Six"--the radical abolitionists who funded Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. The section also features short histories of four events of Brown's radical abolitionist crusades: the Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas, Brown's Missouri raid, the Harpers Ferry raid, and Brown's hanging. The teacher guide offers discussion questions and four classroom activities.

Teaching Teachers Using Primary Sources

Video Overview

David Jaffee details his thoughts on using visual primary sources in teaching, including the importance of establishing the original context of images.

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LL_David.mov
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Teaching Teachers Using Primary Sources
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2:54
Transcript Text

We were working now on the New York City draft riots. I was asked to do some work with visual materials, which is the area that I'm probably most interested in, in thinking about teaching at every level. And so I went, you know, and looked for some materials, and I looked in various books on the draft riots and what was out on the web, and it wasn't hard to find materials.

What I railed against, of course, is the lack of context.

There were materials from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, from Harper's. But I had the really interesting sort of research problem of, "Well, here are these images." What I railed against, of course, is the lack of context. These images appeared in illustrated newspapers and journals with articles, with text, which surrounded it and contextualized it, which framed how the readers would view it because they wouldn't just look at the pictures the way we do. Sort of a similar experience to when we look at a Louis Hine photograph on a wall but forget that it was actually maybe part of a poster or a newspaper article that very much framed how someone in a progressive era would have seen that, and this is a really valuable lesson.

Context Reinstates the Humanity in History

I went to one of the online databases, HarpWeek, as well as Frank Leslie's database. I had some Frank Leslie material, and sort of gave the teachers the next day after I'd done my little research, a few of the articles and images together. And they were just really bowled over. They got my point immediately that, oh, here's another. And they made—second, they really found these really interesting juxtapositions. One article on the draft riots had, one teacher pointed out, a little squib in the corner of the page where it was announced that the social season was beginning in Newport. All these various politicians had gone off to Newport, and it was very odd, obviously, to think that while this sort of blood bath was going on in the streets of New York City, the social season was beginning in Newport and these, you know, politicians and other dignitaries had gone off to start the season. And they, of course, realized, you know, their students would be immensely interested.

So, again, it was sort of careful reading. It was careful viewing, and it was research. And they again rushed past me, the teachers I was involving in this discussion, to say, "Oh, I could do this as a research project." My students could sort of take this instead of what I did, what I found interesting, I could really turn it around and ask them to go dig in that database and come back with little things.

Again, I think one of the great dilemmas with now that we keep talking about using images is we forget that we really want them grounded as well with text, and that's how, often, they appear.

Making Sense of American Popular Songs

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Tunes, lyrics, recordings, sheet music—all are components of popular songs, and all can serve as evidence of peoples, places, and attitudes of the past. Written by Ronald J. Walters and John Spitzer, the guide "Making Sense of American Popular Song" provides a place for students and teachers to begin working with songs as a way of understanding the past.

Savannah Images Project

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Painting, "Vue du Port de Savannah"
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This site, funded by the Georgia Humanities Council and the National Endowment for Humanities, is part of a project that involves teachers and students in historical study by investigating local history and helps them develop technology skills by conducting historical research. The site features more than 300 images of places and events in Savannah and coastal Georgia divided into 17 subjects, such as "First Baptist Church of Savannah", "Fortresses of Savannah," and "James Oglethorpe and the Native Americans". Each topic offers a 750-2500 word essay written by Armstrong Atlantic State University students and professors. Because the authors' levels of expertise vary, the essays are of uneven quality and length. Some essays have links to specific images and bibliographies of suggested scholarly readings. Images offer brief (10-20 word) descriptive captions. This site is ideal for those interested in the history of Savannah and coastal Georgia, and it would also be a useful model for similar local history projects at the high school and college level.

John Brown and the Valley of the Shadow

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Photo, Portrait of John Brown
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Using contemporary newspaper accounts, eyewitness testimonies, photographs, maps, drawings, and later texts, this site presents "narrative threads" linking the events leading up to John Brown's raid in 1859 on the Harper's Ferry arsenal to "the latent history of life in the two Shenandoah Valley towns of Staunton, Virginia, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania." Includes 13 issues of newspapers from the towns; five eyewitness accounts ranging from 2,500 to 9,800 words in length; 30 images of the Brown family members and conspirators; approximately 25 additional photos, published drawings, and maps; a brief listing of Brown's day-to-day movements during the latter half of 1859; and short biographical entries of up to 500 words on each conspirator. This site, parts of which are presently under construction, will be of special interest to teachers who want to use contemporary images and written accounts in their classes on Brown and abolitionism, and for those looking to investigate local history perspectives on events of national importance.