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This week, we are working with a different type of ‘primary source’.
The New York Times Opinionator Blog has a feature titled, “Disunion”
completely focused around the Civil War.
In many of the posts, an author writes about something from a first person perspective as if they were experiencing the
goings on as they happen.
This is particularly insightful due to the idea that the blog is well-researched
and written by experts in various historical disciplines.
To find this source,
go to the link provided with this video
or Google, NYTimes, Opinionator, Disunion.
Start by scrolling through the blog just to get an idea of some of the topics that are written about.
You can see that this blog is updated very regularly.
I also want to draw your attention to the tags.
You should know how tags work if you use
YouTube or Tumblr or Twitter (
although they use hashtags in front of their tags!)
You can click on these tags to find other posts about the same sorts of subjects.
Civil War (US) (1861 – 65) for example,
or Lincoln, Abraham,
or even public speaking.
I’m interested in the idea of nostalgia,
or homesickness among Civil War soldiers.
To search for a specific topic,
we need to use the search box.
Don’t confuse the blog search box with the NYTimes search box!
This happened to me a few times.
I will search for my topic now.
A search for ‘nostalgia’
brings up these results-
‘Private Lives’,
‘Measure for Measure’,
‘Thomas B. Edsall’,
but as you can see, these have nothing to do with the Civil War!
What happened?
We need to make sure we put the word
Disunion into our search
because we want to find the information from that particular sub category of the Opinionator blog.
This can be a little confusing.
I will change my search term to ‘nostalgia AND disunion’.
Now we see that our results are all coming from Disunion.
I’m going to pick the entry “Home Sweet Home” from April, 2012.
This entry explains the concept of nostalgia and how it was diagnosed as an actual sickness among soldiers in the civil war.
Very interesting!
This is a lengthy entry and actually quite informative about this subject.
We spoke a little about authority
when we looked for information from Chronicling America
and in Facts on File.
If we want to find out a little about the author of these blog posts,
you can click on the name of the author to see if they’ve written anything else for the Disunion blog;
in this case Susan Matt has not,
but we can scroll all the way down to the bottom
to learn a little more about her.
She is a professor of history at Weber State University-
definitely an expert,
and someone qualified to write an historical blog post.
Hopefully, the Opinionator Disunion blog is a little more user friendly.
You can search for broad topics,
click on tags,
and navigate through the entries relatively easily.
You can find other entries from within an article-
here’s a link to highlights from the Disunion blog,
or you follow this blog on Facebook (
maybe an even easier interface for you to use to find the entries!)
as well as on Twitter.
I look forward to hearing about your discoveries
and how you learned more about a specific topic.
Good luck!