Disunion

These days we get news, viewpoints and opinions pretty much in realtime. If there’s a war going on in Egypt or Syria, we’re getting simultaneous newsfeeds from journalists and first-hand accounts from local bloggers. Well, this kind of information abundance wasn’t always available. 150 years ago, during the Civil War, newspapers would have journalists out in the field with the soldiers, but they wouldn’t get to file till a bit later. News and accounts were just not that readily available at the time due to technological restraints.

Well, apparently the NYT has found a way to remedy that. In the NYT Opinionator, a blog section of the NYT Opinion pages, they’ve created a blog called Disunion. Basically, it’s using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments from the Civil War to create a blog that follows the Civil War as it unfolds. Having read (or skimmed) through most of it so far (they’re up to March 1862), I’ve found this blog to be quite interesting. I think I would equate this to the twitter retelling of the Christmas story in terms of applying current communication technology to historical events. Anyways, it’s pretty cool and it’s out there in case you want to check it out.