Gettysburg Photographs

As you know, I love looking at Civil War era photographs and I have discussed the site Virtual Civil War before. Well, Mike Lynaugh has put together a collection of original Civil War photographs on his website Virtual Civil War.

This collection of Civil War photographs will allow your students to view some excellent photos or provide you with some primary sources to display for conversation starters within the classroom. The collection contains a good variety of photos from pictures of dead soldiers, to the White House and even ones of famous leaders of the Civil War.

Classroom ideas:

• Have your students look at a photo and then reflect on what they are seeing or have them describe the situation. This goes back to having them think like historians.
  
• Have them create a slideshow of related photos and use Voicethread to share the presentation
  
• Have them pick a particular image and then research more about the clothing, the battle, or location.
• Play detective (CSI) and see what clues they can find by looking with their magnifying glasses (aka, using the Zoom In feature of your photo editor).
  

While you are on the Virtual Civil War site, check out Mike's section on Battlefields Today that contains pictures from battlefields across the US including Gettysburg.

So many photos, so little time. :)

Making New Photos Look Old

Here is something cool you can do with your students. Have them take modern photos and make them look old. For example, here is a photo that I took of some friends of mine from Sykes Regulars.


You can then take the photograph and put it into your favorite photo editor such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or GiMP.

Once you have it in your editor, start playing with the tone to make it look black & white using a sepia tone filter and then next you will want to blur the edges to give it that slightly unfocused look. Play with different filters to see the different effects they have on the image.

Now for some more advanced edits. If you know how to create layers in your editor, you could take the background from an old photograph and place the modern photo (that you have just revised) on top to give you the rough edges of the photo. This would require you to select a portion of the modern photo and then paste it on top of the new layer.

Here is what the revised image might look like:


Let me know what you come up with. This also leads me to consider creating a few short "how-to" videos to put up on TeacherTube on how to do some of these things.

Animated Battalion and Company Drills

` Sykes Regulars, a Civil War reenacting group, have an excellent collection of resources and research in the School of Instruction section of their website. One such section shows one part of the School of the Battalion as a Flash animation and another has three animations on the School of the Company.

So, I was thinking that it is one thing for a teacher to talk about how soldiers would stand in line and turn to the right or left but to show them and then HAVE them actually try the maneuvers.

Check these out:

School of the Battalion - Animated

• Suggestion for getting the subalterns to in front during dress parade

School of the Company - Animated

• Forming the company
• Company Right-Face
• Company Left-Face

You can also view the complete manual for how soldiers would have been positioned and moved on the battlefield online. On the US Regulars website you can view manuals by Hardee, and Casey. You can also lookup the manuals for how to clean a musket, Artillery Tactics and Cavalry Tactics.

Happy reading and researching.