Marked Fort Sumter

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The American Civil War

Eleven southern states left the United States to protect slavery, and four years of war followed, killing about 620,000 soldiers or more. The Union won, and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865.

Place
Fort Sumter · Antietam · Gettysburg · AppomattoxThe Americas
Laid out as
A warTwo sides, a front line, and the turns the fighting took.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

The Union: the United States government and the northern states

  1. ISlavery and the split
  2. IIFort Sumter
  3. IIIEmancipation
  4. IVBlack soldiers
  5. VGettysburg
  6. VIHarriet Tubman’s raid
  7. VIIThe end of slavery

The Confederacy: eleven southern slave states

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Harriet Tubman
  • Ulysses S. Grant
  • Robert E. Lee

Objects

  • The Emancipation Proclamation
  • Photographs by Mathew Brady’s team

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1861 to 1865. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?