The Long Recall

In honor of the upcoming Civil War sesquicentennial The American Interest has begun The Long Recall: An Aggregator of the Civil War.

Walter Russell Mead explains:

We will use a modern form to present the daily news: our Civil War aggregator that combines a short daily summary of the news along with links to articles that a well-informed Civil War-era reader would have wanted to read.  Our goal is to allow readers today to get a feel for what it was like to experience the conflict in real time, to hear the many voices trying to make sense of the conflict, and to sift through sometimes confused and misleading news accounts to try to discern what was actually taking place.

Looks like an interesting and worthwhile project. It’s often difficult for us moderns to visualize the information sources of the people of the 1860s—what they knew and didn’t know, and most of all that they didn’t know how things would turn out any more than we do about future events today.