Your Friend and Classmate: Following the West Point Class of June 1861 Through the American Civil War

Class Year

2019

Document Type

Digital Project

Date of Creation

Summer 2016

Department 1

Library

Abstract

June 24th, 1861, 34 young men graduated from the United States Military Academy a year early to answer the need for more officers in the United States Army. Four had already dropped out of their class before graduation to join the Confederacy, and three more resigned to join the rebelling forces. Of these 38 men, only 28 would live to see the end of the war. Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow Julia Wall’s project “Your Friend and Classmate” tells the story of these cadets, collectively and individually, based on a yearbook that belonged to William H. Harris, one of the June 1861 cadets. In that yearbook, Harris annotated the pictures of his classmates with what the cadets did in the war, keeping up with those that he could. Using the yearbook and Harris’ annotations, Wall created a Scalar site incorporating StoryMapJS and TimelineJS to track the activities of each cadet.

Comments

Final project for the 2016 Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship at Musselman Library, Gettysburg College

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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