About
Civil War Washington is a digital resource that allows users to visualize the complex changes in the city of Washington, DC between 1860 and 1865 through a collection of datasets, statistics, images, texts, and narrative accounts. With the rest of the country, Washington and its people responded in dramatic and distinctive ways to the four years of war. Washington became the most fortified city in the world, and its population tripled. Troops, fugitive slaves, bureaucrats, prostitutes, actors, authors, doctors, nurses, and laborers were among those drawn to the capital by a sense of duty, desperation, or adventure. Rapid construction permanently transformed the city. Military installations, government buildings, hospitals, transportation routes, and all of the other structures required by a national capital at war started to fill in the spaces so grandly laid out in L'Enfant's 1791 plan for a utopian urban metropolis. An interdisciplinary team of scholars have set out with the CWW project to study this transformation that has previously been too vast and multi-faceted for treatment by traditional print scholarship.
This site is directed by Susan C. Lawrence, Kenneth M. Price, and Kenneth J. Winkle and is freely distributed by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Funding and support are provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily reflect those of the NEH.
