The American Civil War, one day at a time

I’ve thought for a while that historical wars would be good candidates for this daily online recounting, for several reasons:

• Wars are finite. If you’re starting a big project, you want to know exactly what you’re taking on, not only for the budget, but for your own sanity. It also provides a built-in narrative structure for the audience.

• Wars are well documented. For any war you’re likely to re-tell, you’ll have more than enough material. The problem will be working out what to use, not finding enough.

• Wars are worth re-telling. We’re taught a lot about parts of important wars, but it’s hard to get a sense of what that means on the scale of day-to-day life. We learn about the big events, without much sense of how they fit together, or what else was happening at the same time.

But re-telling a war in any worthwhile way is a big undertaking, so hats off to the New York Times for giving this a go. The posts don’t, so far, attempt to tell the story of the war from specific historical viewpoints, but each day’s entry is written looking back, by a modern-day expert. Good stuff.

Slightly oddly, the Disunion posts are mixed up among the rest of the Opinionator Blog, which seems to be a place where many series and authors are grouped together. This means the next/previous links on the blog posts don’t take you to the next/previous Disunion posts, only the next/previous within the whole Opinionator section, which is a little jarring.

It would also be lovely if Disunion had its own appearance and accompanying assets. Maybe, though, there are financial, technical or political constraints preventing separating it out, or maybe these are just early days. Something it would be great to see as things develop, unique to Disunion, is more background information. Maps are the obvious one — show me where events happened in relation to each other and the modern world.

It’s also a huge shame the blog posts don’t feature many links. Come on, this is the Web! There are many historical references that don’t mean much to me, and adding links to Wikipedia would transform these accounts as educational experiences. The Times is able to link to its own archive of stories though (eg) which is rather special.

Finally, in the list of quibbles, my heart sank a little that the RSS feed only contains a sentence for each post, but I guess that’s annoyingly common for commercial entities such as this site.

I do, however, like the comments. I wasn’t aware of the Times’ system of picking out “highlighted” comments into a different list. This seems a good balance — there’s no need for most readers to wade through the 100+ comments each day to find the interesting nuggets. Smashing.

So, quibbles aside, a grand start by the New York Times, and it leaves plenty more for other organisations to do in the future, to bring to life other historical events.

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