Hidden Patterns of the Civil War

Visualizing Emancipation is a project of the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab funded by an Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up grant through the We the People initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Scott Nesbit and Edward L. Ayers are the project directors. Robert K. Nelson has aided in the project's database design and Kimberley Klinker and Christopher Kemp have consulted the project on metadata and text reproduction, respectively. Nathaniel Ayers has led the web design. Undergraduate research assistants at the University of Richmond include Alexandra Bloomfield, Lauren Gallagher, Kathleen Leitzao, Megan Molnar, Amani Morrison, Franchesca Santos, Colleen Tobin, and Darleen Underwood.

This map relies on a number of sources, whose editors deserve our profound thanks. Cornell University's Making of America project has digitized the entire Official Records; Tufts University's Perseus Project contains a number of digitized books from the Civil War era, none more helpful than their version of Dyer's Compendium, which Perseus has edited and tagged with geospatial and temporal information. The University of Virginia's Valley of the Shadow project and the University of Richmond's Daily Dispatch have proven valuable for the Shenandoah Valley and Richmond areas, respectively. Online sources residing behind pay walls, too, have done much for the project: Alexander Street Press has collected numerous Civil War-era personal papers into the North American Women's Letters and Diaries archive. InfoTrac has digitized a number of newspapers, including the Boston Herald and Charleston Mercury. Finally, edited and bound collections of primary sources have proven extremely useful as well, particularly Ira Berlin, Leslie Rowland, et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1869 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983-2005).