Civil War Projects: Bloody Lane and Burnside’s Bridge

So, one of my students doing this Civil War project just discovered that his soldier fought at the Roulette Farm at Antietam. He advanced from Roulette Farm across the fields to “Bloody Lane“, where he was probably injured with a bullet wound to the neck.

The guy’s buddies carried him off the battlefield, before being ordered to dump his body in a pile of mortally wounded men, and return to the battlefield. This soldier then realized he was in a stack of the dying, and picked himself up, and walked eight miles to the hospital, occasionally passing out from blood loss along the way.

He made it to the hospital, and lingered eight days under the uncertain care of surgeons, alternately writing to his wife that he was near death and feeling better, before actually dying. The letter from his best friend to his wife survives, and gives us a sense of the funeral arrangements — as it was September and relatively warm, the friend arranged for a funeral with money sent from home, and this soldier is buried in Clarksburg, MD somewhere, rather than at Antietam National Cemetery.

Another kid, working at the next computer as it happened, learned that his person had fought at Antietam… But he was quite disappointed to learn that it wasn’t on Bloody Lane. He wasn’t in the right Connecticut regiment. Alas.

Then we checked out the Antietam Union order of battle article on Wikipedia. And it turns out this guy fought at Burnside’s Bridge, before being detached to go the long way around to Shapsey’s Ford. Then he was part of the contingent that tried to advance to cut off Lee in Sharpsburg, but was driven back.

Fascinating stories emerging!

Civil War and Primary Sources and Google Maps

Last year, the historian-parent of one of my students assembled thirty portfolios of documents on thirty Civil War soldiers from Connecticut — photocopies of letters and diaries and newspaper articles, links to Google ebooks, links to PDFs and websites, addresses and phone numbers for archives and historical societies in Connecticut which had the original papers, and so on.  Quite the undertaking, and I’m incredibly grateful to her for the work she did.

Now this project is in its second year.  The kids this year have the materials assembled by this historian-parent, and they have the materials assembled by last year’s seventh graders.  And they’re already making discoveries quite different from the kids who worked through this material last year.

Working with one kid yesterday, and with the help of Google Maps, we located where one such Connecticut soldier was when he wrote his last letter to his wife before marching out toward an unknown destination.  By tracing the information in his letter, we were able to identify the location of his campsite (within about a mile) the previous night.  Using Wikipedia, we were able to find his commanding general, and using various historical atlases we were able to trace the route of his march.

The march that brought him to Antietam battlefield.

Based on the assigned positions of his commanding officers, we were able to get a rough idea of where he was standing during the morning of the battle, and where he was firing from.  We were able to guess from his letter after the battle, roughly where he was wounded.

And we were able to ascertain where his friends carried him, to lay him down among a pile of other wounded men.  Where, after being ignored for a day or two, he picked himself up from, and walked eight miles toward the nearest hospital.

Which we were able to roughly locate, using Google Maps and the man’s own letters, and the letters of his friends.

And where he died.

Officially not one of the wounded of Antietam, but nonetheless killed by it. A man who marched twenty-odd miles to be wounded in the neck by a passing bullet, and then marched another ten miles, many of them alone and leaking copious amounts of blood, to die in a hospital bed from lack of medical care and sepsis.

And from this I had a vision of what American education could be.  Not an endless round of tests and preparation for tests, but a chance for the discovery and the digitization of the historical lives of thousands or millions of people — pioneers and homesteaders and explorers and scientists and immigrants and all sorts of writers and painters and workers from all sorts of walks of life, where they were and what they were doing while great and terrible events unfolded around them.  And it’s extraordinary that I could go to Maryland and Virginia, and walk the roads that this man walked, or see those roads in satellite photographs, and actually live out the short, extraordinary military life of one man in the Civil War — Enlisted August 7, 1862, Died September 25, 1862 — and see where and how he lived and fought and died — in the space of an hour’s class.

Do we not live in extraordinary times?

Videos: Tang and Song Dynasty China

Two videos, the first explaining the expansion and contraction of China….

And the second, explaining the Tian Ming, or Mandate of Heaven, or Dynastic Cycle, of China.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjqdq-GG-RQ]

VIDEO: American Triangle Trade

A student helped me create this video today.  I got his mom’s permission to upload it, since he doesn’t say his full name or his address (or even his real name!), and we’re good to go!

Google Translate & Julius Caesar

I wanted my students to read Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil Wars for homework.

It was too hard for some of the students, and they faded out. They had no interest in reading it because they didn’t understand it at all.

Thanks to Google Translate, we’ve gone around the problem of the English being too difficult for the international students in our school.  The original text is a public-domain text from the English version of Project Gutenberg.  We stripped the carriage returns, and loaded it into a wiki page.   Then we ran blocks of text through Google Translate.  That produced our text in four languages now, and we’re working on a fifth — Simplified Chinese, Korean, Spanish and English (with Japanese on the way). I’m even thinking that by next year, I want to have a parallel Latin translation.

Nor are the English-speaking students left out. We’re building a dictionary, too.  Every kid has a few paragraphs to review, and any unfamiliar words (or words that their classmates are likely to have problems with), are getting links to definition pages.  And we’re creating a mini-wikipedia of short biographies of the major characters in the book.

You might ask why we’re duplicating all this effort on the school’s website, behind our firewall, when it’s probably been done (and done better, likely) at places like Project Perseus.  The answer is, they need to learn how to use the tools.  And we’re finding that there are all sorts of parallel projects that can be done — providing audio of the different sections of the text, and including photographs and maps.

Speaking of which — does anyone know of a place where you can produce close-in digital maps of various parts of the world?  Yes, I know that Google Earth gives you the ability to zoom-in and look at satellite photos, but that’s not what I mean.  I want to produce maps that show Caesar’s line of march, and places where battles were fought, and so on, that don’t look like crudely-drawn and scanned maps.  I want digital maps.

Anyone know where we can go?

NECC ’09: Nystrom Maps

The silver medal from my ventures into the Vendors Hall at NECC goes to Nystrom, which produces maps.  They’ve taken Google Earth, wedded their proprietary content to the Google Earth globe, and then modularized it.

What does that mean?  It means that they’ve chopped the program up into smaller bits. So if you’re a particularly unusual school that only does Grade 3, and only does Latin America, you can buy the Latin American module for Grade 3.  You only pay for the content that you actually plan to use.

Blog Comment: Kindle pirates textbooks

Amazon has just created a whole new round of piracy.  So if you are a textbook publisher…or any publisher for that matter what are your choices?

A) Continue to pretend that that Kindle does not exist and continue with your model of creating traditional textbooks. […]

B) Embrace that media and textbooks have changed that this is the start of an evolution of textbooks and content, and start creating ways for students to purchase their books in Kindle format. […]

via Amazon Kindle backs Textbook Publishers into a corner « The Thinking Stick.

William Gibson is correct: “The future is here, but not evenly distributed.” Huge parts of the U.S. will continue to need textbooks for the near term, particularly in poor inner-city and rural schools.  Student and teachers in rich urban magnet schools and suburban schools  — and even rich individuals in those poor schools — will start carrying Kindles with (some pirated) textbooks in them.  

But the bigger tidal wave is just around the corner.  I teach ancient history.  I need access to things like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Gospel according to Mark, Exodus, and the writings of people like Herodotus, Julius Caesar, Livy, and Suetonius.  For decades, these works have been expensive or out of print for students.  The solution was textbooks: massive, thousand page tomes of world history every bit as obsolete as the Nuremberg Chronicle.  These texts had to cover everything: the rise of the Catholic Church, the Gupta Empire, the collapse of the Han Dynasty, the Mongol Ascendancy, Marco Polo, Erik the Red and Ibn Battuta.

I don’t need a textbook any more.  I have Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and other sources.  I can build a ‘textbook’ specifically for my course, and put it online.  

Has Amazon just changed the game? Will textbook publishers be able to wrap their heads around this fast enought to change their modle? Even the New York Times after knowing that they could save money by giving everyone a Kindle, can’t seem to fully wrap their head around the change.

via Amazon Kindle backs Textbook Publishers into a corner « The Thinking Stick.

Yes, Amazon has changed the game, in that Amazon has created a tool that enables the use of .pdfs in the classroom?  Will textbook publishers be able to adjust to their changed business model?  I doubt it.  It’s in their interests to continue to milk poor rural and poor urban school districts for as long as possible; and as a result they will keep textbook prices high for a long time — as long as they can, really.

But really… there are plenty of free sources out there. If your school is using big, heavy literature books like those pictured here, well… you’re missing out.  All of Jane Austen, all of Charles Dickens, the whole Bible, numerous other books of literature and poetry… they’re all online, and free.   

I know that teachers have lots to do, really I do.  ”But we don’t have time to assemble our own textbooks!” I hear you cry.  Yet the truth is, a teacher who know how to find, remix, and represent content has more 21st century options than one who doesn’t.   Find partners, build teams, create content specific to your school district, and undersell (cheap or free!) the textbook publishers using free online content.

The real sticking points here will be maps and images.  We need access to more images, so that we’re not stuck all the time with the same half-dozen images of authors, political figures, battles and historical events.  We need to find content providers who are willing to unlock their digital images and troves of maps in exchange for the privilege of having the archetypal icon of Edward III and his Model Parliament in all the textbooks, that students and teachers will travel dozens or hundreds of miles to see in person.