Creating The Ultimate Civil War Resource
Richard Dobbins has made it his mission to gather every single record of every single soldier into one huge, organized, searchable Internet database.
July/August 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 5
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EmailIt’s all tedious work, and it can get especially maddening for Dobbins when he’s trying to make out frilly handwriting preserved on aging microfiche. Still, he grinds on. For him, the job is something of a higher calling, a public works project of the Digital Age. He finds pride and solace in the idea that absolutely any Civil War soldier, and at least the rudiments of that soldier’s story, can be extracted from these mountains of paper records. And he’s not oblivious to the irony in his mission. Computers, which so often can seem dehumanizing, are in this case just the opposite. “From the richness of the data,” he says, “you learn what really happened to these people.”
American Heritage is proud to host the
National Portal to
Historic Collections
Recently added:
- American Revolution Center
- National Museum of Civil War Medicine
- National Museum of the U.S. Navy
- Manassas National Battlefield
- Maryland State House
In association with the
American Association for State and Local History
Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
