WE ARE COOKING UP FOR YOU A FEAST OF ALL THE HISTORY THERE EVER HAS BEEN CALLED JEFFERSON COUNTY WITH THE CIVIL WAR AT ITS HEART. ARGUABLY THE MOST HISTORIC PRESERVED RURAL COUNTY IN AMERICA. WHAT A RIDE!
Welcome to the new location of civilwarscholars.com. We are still transferring ten years of content from its old site that was hit with malware that affected the search results presentation on search engines. This site will be an “https” site for greater security.
Civilwarscholars.com was launched by American Public University System (apus.edu) and its content curator, Jim Surkamp, in June, 2011 and has become a site with over a million words of content, heavily sourced, and with over 20,000 images and custom montages to tell the stories. On youtube, we have videos that match the post. On flickr, we have the words from the posts and videos and flickr shows the accompanying images numbered and sequenced within the provided script.
Flickr taught us that people LOVE stories as well as great images. We firmly believe that telling history accurately is better by adding informed text images, sound, rhythm, and movement. This enhances engagement and later, retention – Jim Surkamp
I believe that Gutenberg found the model for his time that could distribute knowledge cheaply and at great scale.
We now see the successor to Gutenberg’s fading vision – that of the free, easily accessible content to billions on youtube, vimeo and other multimedia platforms. Educators who fail to recognize this change will not reach young learners. And they must update.
All history is, at its root, about people.
Guns, laws, gadgets, economic systems are all just tools people hatch and use to express their desires, beliefs and intentions. They are mere abstractions that get their power, for good or ill, in the hands of people. Sometimes they are used to give one “tribe” advantage over other “tribes” or better, to give opportunity, in fair proportion, to all tribes – all people.
At civilwarscholars.com, we sometimes go far afield from the Civil War, with that War, enslavement, and the Southern counter-revolution being the most definitive and pivotal tragedies of our nation. So, we cover George Washington as well as some 20th century figures for better perspective.
We seek to tell fact-based stories of the Civil War, not shy about scraping off some barnacles that new facts and insights have discredited.
A very good example are the in-depth interviews with Dennis Frye and Dr. Thomas Clemens, who together with almost ninety years of regular examination of the most complete record of the matter, represent the most complete body of knowledge and understanding ever in the investigation into the 1862 Maryland Campaign.
Our infinite interest in the Civil War has, sadly, drowned out much of the REST of American history, because as Thomas Hardy once said war makes “rattling good history.” We have little understanding of the organic journey of American history outside the gates of its moments of destruction, treated with the salve of stories of heroism.
Examples of extremely important and completely forgotten people that we have enthusiastically and knowledgeably redeemed are Martin Delany, James Rumsey, John Hall, Harriet Lane Johnston, and Charles Broadway Rouss. You will get to know them here probably for the first time.
Jim Surkamp, curator of civilwarscholars.com
