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Younghusband
Author

Younghusband

Date

May 21st, 2007

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4 minute Civil War

Comments to this entry

kende
May 21, 2007
7:51 pm
That's a fantastic video. Teaches more about the Civil War in a few minutes than most high school history classes get to sink in ever.
jon
May 21, 2007
9:05 pm
Love the video. It really shows how inconsequential most of the "great" Southern victories were. Also, knowing the history to begin with, you really get to see graphically just how important Grant and Sherman were to the Union. Finally, you see how delusional Jeff Davis was after the fall of Petersburg and Richmond to think that the South could win an outright victory in the war, if only Lee and Johnston could link up and try to defeat Sherman and Grant in detail. Besides the most obvious fact that either of those two northern armies outnumbered the combined forces of Lee and Johnston.
Curzon
May 21, 2007
10:48 pm
Awesome. I've always felt that geographic visualization of history is vital to understanding any "big picture" view of events, and this is probably the best way to do it -- time-specific, one week per second fluctuations.
PurpleSlog
May 22, 2007
12:31 am
Wow. Thanks for posting that!
ElamBend
May 22, 2007
12:45 am
That is great. It shows the importance of the western campaigns (particularly linking up the Mississippi), it shows how much stasis there was during much of the war (fueling the anti-war copperheads), and boy-o-boy does that KIA ticker click along, even when it seems as if nothing is 'happening' on the map. Sherman's march looks particularly signifigant.
alec
May 22, 2007
1:16 am
I love the Ken Burns music too. Harkens me back to the days of being a young'en, watching the PBS documentary and enjoying my proximity to significant battle sites. By the way, if you any of you live in the US and feel like seeing the wonders of capitalism in action, go to Gettysburg and enjoy firsthand some grade A degradation of a revered national site.
Dan tdaxp
May 23, 2007
7:37 am
Extremely beautiful. The KIA counter is horrifying, especially when nothing is happening. Bravo!
Jayson
May 26, 2007
3:14 pm
Hey, what happened? Why was the clip removed?!
Younghusband
May 28, 2007
3:55 am
Looks like the video was removed from YouTube by the user. Too bad...
Brian
November 8, 2007
12:19 am
http://www.idkwtf.com/videos/latest-videos/the-civil-war-in-four-minutes
Here's the alternate link.
bristlecone
November 8, 2007
4:40 am
Jon, the South didn't have to destroy the Grand Army of the Republic. They just had to make it painful enough for the North to decide it wasn't worth the cost.

Not unlike Ho Chi Minh's tactics in the Vietnam war or Murtha's tactics in the Iraq war.

They also hoped to hang on long enough to get the British to pressure the North to the bargaining table. They thought a cotton embargo would hurt the Brits more than it did and overestimated British animus toward the Yankees. The Confederates were willing to become a British client state (the South was full of tory sympahizers during the Revolution).

I think the South might well have won had the war started a hundred years later.