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Announcement of Civil War Maps Collection to be Added to American Memory Maps documenting battles, troop movements, reconnaissance efforts and locations of fortifications are a part of the most recent addition to the American Memory historical collections. The Civil War Maps collection contains approximately 2240 Civil War maps and charts and 76 atlases and sketchbooks that are held within the Library’s Geography and Map Division. A selection of these maps, based on Civil War Maps: An Annotated List of Maps and Atlases in the Library of Congress, will be made available through American Memory. Updates will be made to this collection on a monthly basis. Though the large majority of these maps were created during the time of the Civil War, a number were created afterwards to illustrate or explain certain events or battles. Publishers in the North and South created maps included in this collection by both Union and Confederate forces. An introductory essay provides a discussion of mapping during the Civil War highlighting materials that are within the Geography and Map Division of the Library. Of special interest are maps created by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, a topographical engineer for the Confederate Army. Hotchkiss’s granddaughter donated these maps to the Library of Congress in 1948. Generals Lee and Jackson used a number of his maps as they planned strategy for various battles. Future updates will include images from his notebooks, which contain detailed notes about his various map projects. Also included are maps that were owned by General William Tecumseh Sherman. Some of these maps, which were donated by members of his family, document Sherman’s military campaigns in Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas. Users may also be interested in maps that were created as propaganda items to encourage support of one side or the other during wartime and maps that were published in various newspapers. Panoramic maps and city plans are included within the collection. The Civil War Maps collection compliments many of the American Memory collections currently online including the Selected Civil War Photographs, Pioneering the Upper Midwest, California as I Saw It, Historic American Sheet Music and the WPA Life Histories. Images from these and other collections are used to highlight the material within the Civil War Maps collection and to provide links to these related collections. The Civil War Maps collection can be found at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/cwmhtml/ For questions please send email to [log in to unmask] _________________________________________________________ Elizabeth L. Brown Automated Reference Services Librarian National Digital Library Program, LIBN/NDL/LC(1330) Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540-1330 [log in to unmask] telephone: 202/707-2235 Library of Congress American Memory Home Page: http://memory.loc.gov/ _________________________________________________________