behind AotW

The end of an era.

Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community,
is closing on October 26, 2009.

Your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web

After years of playing with Antietam battle information and biography on paper, then in spreadsheets and text files, I started putting it online in 1992. I had an email account with a community organization and a little FTP space on their server. The Gopher service was my friend.

When I learned about web browsing and hypertext, I saw before me the holy grail. Finally – an effective way to tie all the people and event threads together. I did a little poking about and found GeoCities’ free hosting.  The price was attractive, so I opened Antietam on the Web there in November 1996…

G.A. Custer (c. 1865, Library of Congress)

I’ve just been reading a brand-new edition of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, out just last month from Sterling Publishing.  It’s a beautifully packaged and illustrated version of the landmark 1970 work, which looks at the West from 1860-90. I recommend it highly.

While the main point of the book is the Indian experience, of course, some of the prominent actors in the story jump out at me because they were also veterans of the Battle of Antietam.  Which is a good excuse to find some post-War photos of a half-dozen of these men and catch up a little with their later careers …

Saturday was another great day to be at the Antietam National Battlefield Park.

It began early for me with an uneventful drive up the National Pike route, and a SHAF meeting in Keedysville which introduced promise of more website improvements and some exciting initiatives for the organization for the near future.

After a photo-op at the battlefield Visitor Center and a low-fat gourmet lunch at the Battleview, I walked the newish Bloody Lane Trail with Craig Swain. Craig is a former Armor Officer and an excellent companion in the field.  Thanks Craig!

As I always find when walking a part of the field I hadn’t seen before, the new perspective brought me an entirely different appreciation of the history of the place. And some new views that I enjoyed for their own sake…

Frederick Phisterer’s New York in the War of the Rebellion (3rd Edition, 6 volumes, Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1909-12) is probably the single best resource on New York military units and officers in the Civil War. It is two other things also, which are exciting to the likes of me: it’s beautifully displayed online by the Internet Archives (IA) folks, and is in the Public Domain – free of any copyright restrictions.

New York in the War comes neatly packaged in 5 volumes and an index.  IA offers 4 versions of each volume:

• Read Online – a flip book display of all the page images.  Very high image quality, and relatively fast loads (at least with my broadband connection). You can move about in the book here as you would in its paper cousin: click on the right page to turn ahead, the left to go back. You can also jump to a page by number or by link(s) in a set of search results.
• PDF – a view of the page images in an Adobe Acrobat file.  This downloads to your desktop, and can take a while at 50MB or more per volume. The interface is the usual one for a pdf – and depends on your reader/browser combination.
• Full text – a somewhat jumbled simple text file of the entire volume displayed in your browser window, all in one pile. Searchable using your browser’s “Find” tool, but can be hard to use.  Looks like an uncorrected product of OCR after scanning.  It is probably the version used to support text searching in the flip-book display.  If he text is mangled here, it doesn’t search well there. If you want to copy native text for use elsewhere, you’ll do that from this text view.
• DjVu – a cool viewer technology from Lizardtech which runs as an applet in your browser.  Gorgeous high-resolution images of each page and a pretty viewer, but at the cost of large file sizes.  This can mean very slow loading and paging. I haven’t used this much, so I expect there’s more here than meets the eye.

Plus a file transfer (ftp) repository for all versions and files, so you can grab a copy of any of their files for each volume.

My favorite version for reading online has been the two-page-at-a-time “flip book” view, but I thought it might be easier to navigate across the volumes if it had a hyperlinked table of contents (hyperTOC!).  So I wrote a rudimentary one …

The Bombardment of Fort Sumter (by Alexander Oscar Levy, from Phisterer, Vol. 1, opposite pg. 316)