On a touch screen: drag to move, pinch to zoom, double-tap to zoom in.
We can show you where every important control lives — the map, timeline, chapters, modes, search and your notes. Nothing advances until you choose Next.
This is a situation map of the American Civil War and the generation that made it — the kind of map Lincoln studied in the War Department telegraph office, redrawn month by month. It opens in 1840 on a map of the whole continent, where Mexico still holds California and the Southwest, Texas is an independent republic and Britain shares Oregon, and it shows how one decade of conquest turned the question of new land into the question of slavery. From April 1861 the war map takes over, with the eleven-state Confederacy in charcoal, the loyal slave states in a tan border belt, and a dashed line marking where freedom stopped in 1860. Then the anaconda, the Union’s plan to squeeze the South by blockade and river war, does its work: the coast in ’61, the rivers in ’62, the Mississippi in ’63, Georgia in ’64 — the grey-tan of Union control spreading until, in the spring of 1865, there is nothing left to color.
Thirteen chapters make an argument about the war: how the conquest of Mexico made the slavery question unavoidable, why compromise failed, why the weaker side nearly won, what emancipation did and did not do, how a democracy held an election in the middle of a civil war — and what Reconstruction won and lost. Every battle, arrow and boundary is drawn where it happened. Take the guided tour, or scrub the timeline and interrogate the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
This is one of twenty-one atlases — the ★ at the top left returns to the library at any time.