Civil War Map Mash-Up

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For this week’s wiki-project I chose to map our 5 sites that were important during our Civil War. This map would be appropriate to use in a middle school history class (grades 5-8) as a small part of a larger study about the Civil War.

I remember that my own study of the civil war quickly became a memorization game of the names of a bunch of important generals and dates of a bunch of important battles. I think we often neglect to realize how important the geography of the civil war is; key events were happening on both the northern and southern fronts of this war. I believe that Google maps is an easy way to organize this information and begin to get a visual understanding of what was happening and when.

One of the nice features about Googlemaps is the ability to save your map, view your map, and then go back and edit your map. Instead of inundating students with a whole bunch of battle sites, capitals, and key places, this type of map mash-up has the potential to be added on to as the study of the Civil War progresses. In my own mash-up I chose to include a date with every site on my map. Most history classes study things sequentially, a map like this has the potential to build upon itself, a feature that will lend itself to a visual understanding of how and where this war progressed.

Obviously there were more than 5 key events that happened during the Civil War –I merely chose five to get started. Incorporating a mash-up into a history unit creates the potential for students to contribute to the map too. With so many key events and so many key places, a teacher could use the map’s collaboration feature and each student could be research one event and create a single site on the map mash-up. When combined, the class would have a fairly comprehensive picture of what they had been studying –which I think is pretty cool!