behind AotW

I’ve been on a fruitful run over the last couple of weeks looking into North Carolina soldiers who were at the battle of Sharpsburg. It began with the following haunting photograph from the Time-Life Voices volume on the battle of Fredericksburg …

W.B. Whitaker (Time-Life’s Voices: Fredericksburg, courtesy Frances Honeycutt)

He’s First Sergeant – later Captain – William Benjamin Whitaker of Henderson County, North Carolina. Last week saw the anniversary of his death at Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1862. He’d enlisted in Company I of the 16th Infantry in May 1861 and was promoted Captain in April 1862.

Looking into him, I found two extensive works online about North Carolina State Troops in the War. I’ll assemble hyperlinked tables of contents (hyperTOCs) for each to save a little time on future research.

First – in this post – an old standby reference work: Moore’s Roster. Next time, Walter Clark’s Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions…

Bad news and good news. The bad news is that the famed website cwartillery.org is no more. The good news is that the core information – if not the lively, efficient design – is still available online.

header, The Civil War Artillery Page, 1999 (C. Ten Brink)

Unfortunately, original author Chuck Ten Brink can no longer maintain the site, but he has passed the material to the care of the Robinson Artillery. It begins on their Civil War Artillery page.

Chuck first put his work on the subject on the Web in 1996, and has been thereafter the go-to guy for many of us on terminology, equipment details, guns and artillerists, and (in partnership with Wayne Stark) the Civil War Artillery Encyclopedia and the National Register of Surviving Civil War Artillery (sample: Antietam’s page c. 1998).

I’ll very much miss the old site, but say Hurrah, Chuck, for your long online service!

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)

M.A. and G.A.G. Coppens (1861, from Cowan’s Auctions)

This stunning piece is a rare image of two Louisiana Zouaves, one of whom was killed in action at Sharpsburg. It is among a trove of pictures of “my boys” I’ve harvested from the web in the last few days – thanks to Cowan’s, Heritage, and Museum Quality Americana auction houses.

I’ve ranted in the past about our history disappearing into the hands of private collectors (and it’s still a shame this stuff isn’t in public repositories), but I’m mostly reconciled to that. As long as firms like Cowan’s continue to make their archives of past sales available on the web, I think they’re acting in some ways as digital museums – and doing us a great service.

I’ll be pushing more than 20 of these new-to-me images of Antietam/Sharpsburg participants to AotW over the next few days. Among some of the most compelling is the lovely tinted half-plate ambrotype above, along with a crisp CDV and a mustering-out group photograph below …

Buried below the fold here on the blog are a number of fantastic discussions growing from older biographical posts. As site owner I can see these conversations as they happen, but I’m not sure either of our other readers notice. Hence this pop-up flag. That, and I’m not getting any writing of my own done …

Notable lately have been contributions from Morrisons and a Lewis. Look in comments more recently, too, for insights from descendents of Weisiger and Clark. Old mysteries solved, but new avenues opened as well, so please jump in if you can help.

The many of the Morrison Clan who have stopped in to add information have driven the comment count on last year’s piece on patriarch Robert Hall Morrison to first place all-time. I’m amazed by the rich detail these family historians have brought to the story, and recommend you get caught up if you’ve not been following the threads there.

Anne Morrison Garber also seeks help locating Morrison scholar Sarah Marie Eye’s new email address … anyone?

Enoch Lewis’ descendent Annie Lewis teases of connections to the US Military Academy at West Point in a new comment. Do please speak up if you know where that hint leads. Captain Lewis’ case is still a tangle of unanswered questions of politics and motivation to me.

Oh for more time to research …

Your assignment: catch up with some new and fascinating online work about the Maryland Campaign of 1862.

Recent and ongoing now is an excellent discussion about who did what at Sharpsburg on TalkAntietam*. Beginning with fine-grain research Dean Essig is doing for his new wargame–with other genuine experts weighing in–the group is exploring the reality of the “numbers” of the battle. The unintentional but inescapable conclusion here may be that it’s impossible to acurately quantify the battle. See what you find …

from Harper’s Weekly, 24 October 1863 (Son of the South).

Be sure also to catch the two latest feature articles Larry Freiheit has contributed to AotW. At the top is his view of Military Intelligence in Maryland from both General’s perspectives. You’ll find a number of ‘hmmm’ moments in that piece. Larry’s also the author of an analysis of JEB Stuart’s cavalry at and before Sharpsburg, which was posted just before the anniversary last year. Mighty fine.

Also fresh is John David Hoptak’s masterful biographical sketch of Brigadier James Nagle. Ranger Hoptak is highly fluent on Nagle and the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, as you probably know from his blog. Thanks to the Save Historic Antietam Foundation for sharing that work online. When you see (or visit) next, ask John how you can help restore the General’s sword, too.

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* Anyone can read the messages on TalkAntietam, but you’ll have to join the group and be approved to contribute. But that’s easy, trust me. I know the group moderator really well; I can get you in :)

I’ve just stumbled over a fascinating project of Christoper Busta-Peck’s covering the Old National Road/National Pike. You probably know that part of that historic thoroughfare was on the path of the Armies during the Maryland Campaign of 1862.

National Pike milestone, recreated (C. Busta-Peck)

Christoper is a librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and is using the blogging medium to perfection, as I see it, to illuminate history right under our noses. History, I dare say, most of us have missed. Do go see his excellent use of GoogleMaps to cover the milemarkers and other sights along the Road, in addition to the range of other fine posts on the subject.

When he started in September 2007, Christopher explained:

This blog is my attempt to describe and share my journeys on the National Pike, as it winds its way from Baltimore to Cumberland, Maryland, as well as the National Road, from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois. I plan to include plenty of photographs, maps to describe the journey.

The blog post that finally caught my attention today is about the series of 19th Century stone bridges over the Antietam and the 1910 book on the subject by Helen Ashe Hays. He’s scanned and posted the superb photos from that volume. Both of my readers will immediately recognize the spans in his post as brothers and sisters of what’s now known as Burnside Bridge.

Bravo. Brilliant!

Man, oh man, am I having fun with my mini-vacation. I promised myself a few days between Christmas and New Year’s–after family visits and home chores–to devote to research and writing for Antietam on the Web. Most people would see this as an odd use of valuable free time, but I find it therapeutic play.

Today I’m pulling threads in a huge source that’s new to me: the HeritageQuest database service from ProQuest. It’s a searchable collection of thousands of books and other documents. I’d not looked into it before, thinking wrongly that it was only genealogical information. If you’re as lucky as I, and your library has a subscription, you can get to it from home by the web at the price of a library card…

Citrus sinensis (A. Newton, USDA, 1915)

Not known as an omphaloskeptic, I’ve nonetheless been meditating on some things that have been piling up in my blog ‘idea box’ over the last year. Grumpy little snippets about blogging and history. Things noted over the year. Pray humor me as I unburden myself in a collection of mini-posts here. Call it end-of-year housekeeping…

In Google Books: Is it Good for History? in the latest Perspectives–the journal of the American Historical Association (AHA)–Robert Townsend reprises his April AHA blog post with

The Google Books project promises to open up a vast amount of older literature, but a closer look at the material on the site raises real worries about how well it can fulfill that promise and the potential costs to history scholarship and teaching.

I think he misses the point; and yes, the Google Books project is good for History …