December 9, 1999
REVIEW
Razzle-Dazzle Look at the Civil War on Disc
By DAVID M. OSHINSKY
THE CIVIL WAR EXPERIENCE
(SouthPeak Interactive; $40; CD-ROM for Windows 95 and 98.)
rom almost every perspective -- political, economic, moral,
military -- the Civil War remains the defining moment in our
history. More than 600,000 soldiers
died, a president was assassinated,
and four million slaves were freed.
In its aftermath, one region lay in
ruins, but most Americans prospered as never before: their country
had been saved, its government
strengthened, its indivisibility preserved.
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FACTS AND FUN - The Civil War Experience combines games with extensive and detailed historical information .
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For those seeking to understand
this conflict's remarkable grip on
our collective imagination, The Civil
War Experience is a good place to
start.
Bulging with information,
beautifully put together and simple
to navigate, it combines serious history with mindless (though mildly
addictive) razzle-dazzle.
Made in
conjunction with the History Channel, the disc includes 150 top-flight
biographies of leading Civil War figures and dozens of topical essays
supplemented by video clips and eyewitness accounts. There are video
games that allow you to blast the
enemy with cannon fire and run a
naval blockade. There is also a trivia
game that I strongly urge overconfident historians to avoid.
The opening section of this CD-ROM, The Road to War, is disappointing. Essays on topics like the
Missouri Compromise (1820-1821),
the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and
the Dred Scott decision (1857) provide some historical background, a
sound idea, except that the essays,
alas, are flat, poorly connected and
confuse the slavery issue.
In the
Dred Scott essay, for example, we
are told that ""Southerners saw the
decision as a guarantee that slavery
would be protected within Southern
borders."" In fact, that point had long
been conceded by most Northerners,
Lincoln among them.
What Southerners really saw in the Dred Scott
decision was a guarantee that slavery would be protected into the vast
federal territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican
War.
Most viewers, I suspect, will peruse The Civil War Experience for
important people and events, like
Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Battle of
Gettysburg and the Emancipation
Proclamation.
The search functions are excellent.
Following simple instructions, I began my journey by typing in ""Stonewall."" Eighteen sources for Gen.
Thomas J. Jackson appeared, each
accessible with the click of a mouse.
I learned that he got his nickname
after standing firm at the First Battle of Bull Run and that his battlefield tactics, marked by supreme
self-confidence and personal fury,
were responsible for much of the
South's early military success. I also
discovered that this eccentric general, believing one side of his body to
be larger than the other, kept an arm
raised skyward to increase the flow
of blood to his less developed side
and purposely ate food he hated in
the hope that denial of pleasure
would make him ""morally better.""
When Jackson fell at Chancellorsville in 1863, shot accidentally by his
own troops, the hopes of the South
may have died with him.
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Exploring a conflict
that still grips the
collective imagination
of Americans.
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The Civil War Experience contains
a military time line detailing every
skirmish from 1861 through 1865,
with major battles like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and Vicksburg receiving lavish attention.
Influenced perhaps by Ken
Burns's ""Civil War"" documentary,
the disc's makers included grainy
photographs of bloated corpses, muffled sounds of cannon fire and cavalry charges, somber renderings of
eyewitness accounts and talking
heads explaining the finer points of
warfare.
Major battles are divided
into days, sometimes hours, with excellent maps.
Military buffs will find much to
admire.
Want to know the sort of
shells that Union gunners lobbed toward Confederate lines? Click on Artillery. Want to know the colors of the
15th Kentucky Infantry Regiment?
Click on Flags of War. Want to know
how many Jewish soldiers fought for
each side? Click on Ethnic Regiments.
(The answer: 5,500 Jews for
the North, 3,000 for the South.) Those
craving more information will find
that Jews were ""less prone to bacteria-based diseases"" because they ate
kosher food.
The best parts of The Civil War
Experience document the daily lives
of soldiers, civilians and slaves --
their work, clothes, food, games and
music. You can follow a young infantryman or naval officer, on either
side, from enlistment through discharge or death.
A powerful section portrays the
horrors of prison camps like Andersonville in Georgia and Elmira in
upstate New York. Some 420,000 soldiers from both sides were penned up
like animals and nearly 50,000 died.
A section about medical care details things like the workings of a
field hospital where amputations
were performed with a saw, some
whiskey and large doses of opium
and morphine. Those who survived
often faced a life of drug addition --
known as Old Soldier's Disease.
The Civil War Experience offers
an exceptional, almost smothering,
coverage of events. What it lacks --
what it may have consciously avoided -- is an overview of the conflict
that weaves together important
events into a coherent whole.
How,
exactly, did the Union victory at Antietam alter President Lincoln's
plans for the abolition of slavery?
What impact did the Civil War's revolutionary technological advances
have upon America's future industrial growth? Why, in the end, do we
consider this glorious bloodletting to
be the most important event in our
nation's history? For answers to
questions like these, a trip to the
public library is still very much in
order.
David M. Oshinsky is chairman of
the history department at Rutgers.