Announcement of New American Memory Collection

[Danna Bell-Russel]

Announcement of Civil War Maps Collection to be Added to American Memory

Maps documenting battles, troop movements, reconnaissance efforts and
locations of fortifications are a part of the most recent addition to
the American Memory historical collections. The Civil War Maps
collection contains approximately 2240 Civil War maps and charts and 76
atlases and sketchbooks that are held within the Library’s Geography and

Map Division. A selection of these maps, based on Civil War Maps: An
Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress, will be
made available through American Memory. Updates will be made to this
collection on a monthly basis.

Though the large majority of these maps were created during the time of
the Civil War, a number were created afterwards to illustrate or explain

certain events or battles.  Publishers in the North and South created
maps included in this collection by both Union and Confederate forces.
An introductory essay provides a discussion of mapping during the Civil
War highlighting materials that are within the Geography and Map
Division of the Library.

Of special interest are maps created by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, a
topographical engineer for the Confederate Army. Hotchkiss’s
granddaughter donated these maps to the Library of Congress in 1948.
Generals Lee and Jackson used a number of his maps as they planned
strategy for various battles. Future updates will include images from
his notebooks, which contain detailed notes about his various map
projects. Also included are maps that were owned by General William
Tecumseh Sherman. Some of these maps, which were donated by members of
his family, document Sherman’s military campaigns in Tennessee,
Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas. Users may also be interested in
maps that were created as propaganda items to encourage support of one
side or the other during wartime and maps that were published in various

newspapers. Panoramic maps and city plans are included within the
collection.

The Civil War Maps collection compliments many of the American Memory
collections currently online including the Selected Civil War
Photographs, Pioneering the Upper Midwest, California as I Saw It,
Historic American Sheet Music and the WPA Life Histories. Images from
these and other collections are used to highlight the material within
the Civil War Maps collection and to provide links to these related
collections.

The Civil War Maps collection can be found at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/cwmhtml

For questions please send email to maps at loc.gov.



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Danna C. Bell-Russel
National Digital Library Learning Center
202-707-4159
dbell at loc.gov