About
Civil War Washington is directed by Susan C. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lorang, Kenneth M. Price, and Kenneth J. Winkle and is published by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. (For more on project participants, see our participants page.) Civil War Washington allows users to study, visualize, and theorize the complex changes in the city of Washington, DC between 1860 and 1865 through a collection of datasets, images, texts, and maps. 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. With Civil War Washington, an interdisciplinary team of scholars has set out to study this transformation, one too vast and multi-faceted for treatment by traditional print scholarship.
Funding and support are provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily reflect those of the NEH or UNL.
For more information, consult our frequently asked questions page. If you have further questions or comments about the content of Civil War Washington, please contact us. Comments about web design or functionality should be sent to cdrh@unl.edu.
Rights and Usage
Civil War Washington, by Susan C. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lorang, Kenneth M. Price, and Kenneth J. Winkle, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which allows others to distribute and adapt our work, so long as they credit Civil War Washington, make their work available non-commercially, and distribute their work under the same terms. Requests for permission to publish or otherwise use our materials for commercial projects should be emailed to the project team. We will respond to your request as soon as possible, typically within a few days. Parts of Civil War Washington may include third-party content that is made available on different terms. (Rights to images, for example, are often held by institutions or individuals who have shared them with us.) In such cases, and where that use does not fall under the terms of fair use, we indicate the different terms or acknowledge that the content is used with permission. For permission to use these materials, contact the rights holders directly.
Civil War Washington relies on and promotes collaboration and shared data, research, texts, images and intellectual products. The editors hope that their work will encourage discovery, debate, and further inquiry.
