 Dr. Grimm, tell us a little bit about the background of this exhibit. This exhibition was planned and organized by the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center. One of our primary missions is to make our maps known to school children. And we determined that with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaching, this would make a good topic that we could relate to classroom endeavors. As we planned the exhibition, we decided we did not want to do the typical Civil War exhibit that focused on just the battles. Instead, we decided we wanted to talk about what were the causes, what led up to the Civil War. We would look at the war itself and then finally we wanted to talk about how the war was remembered. So in that context, we developed an exhibition with three parts. The first part of the exhibit focuses on the causes of the Civil War. We call it Rising Tensions. And this theme was inspired by a cartoon that was published in 1864 by Courier Knives. This cartoon shows Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis pulling on a map of the United States and pulling it apart. Davis emphasizes the idea that the United States in the pre-Civil War years was not a unified country. It was a country that had different economies and different cultures which resulted in different political tensions. Dr. Grimm, one of the issues that caused some of the tensions between the North and the South prior to the war was the issue of slavery. And this map that you're standing in front of now illustrates that. Talk about it a little bit, please. One of the very interesting maps in the exhibition is a map that was published in 1861 which shows the percentage of slaves in each county in the southern states based on the 1860 census. Slavery was one of the major issues between the North and the South. Generally people talk about the free North and the slave South and they think slaves were uniformly distributed throughout the South but they weren't, they were most prevalent where plantation agriculture was the primary economic activity. So tobacco in Virginia caught in the cross much of the South and sugar in the lower Mississippi Valley. Now this map was very important to Abraham Lincoln. He studied this map and we know that because an artist, Francis Bichnell Carpenter included this map in a painting of Abraham Lincoln announcing the Emancipation Proclamation. The artist lived in the White House for six months and recorded how Lincoln looked at this map. He was interested not so much in the dark areas which were the areas of heavy a slave concentration but in the lighter areas because that's where he would find more sympathy for the Northern troops and for his announcing the Emancipation Proclamation. Many people when they think of a map they think of something that displays a geographic feature but this is a map of something else that's more of a social feature and talk about how those are important in an exhibition like this. Okay well this map is, this particular map is very important because it was one of the first thematic or statistical maps published in the United States. It took census data and represented it according to geographic areas. It's not the type of map we normally expect. It doesn't show topography or towns or cities but it shows one statistic and it shows the spatial distribution at that particular time. Once the war began people were obviously interested in following the war and the progress of the war. We're standing in front of something called a marking map. What is that? This map was prepared, it was published in Boston. It was prepared for the people at home to follow the war. So in other words as they receive news either by telegram, newspaper or letter they could locate on the map where battles were taking place and if they liked they could use red and blue colored pencils which came with the map to mark the root of the regiment or their relatives as they moved from battle site to battle site. Obviously at that time people were not getting real time information about wars as we do today so this was how they kept track of things. What was sort of the time delay in reporting at the time between the time of battle and the time it would appear in the newspaper do you know? It varied and at the beginning of the war we have one example of a newspaper map that appeared ten days after the battle. Then when the battle event Tiedem took place we see maps appearing in newspapers two to three days after the battle. But the time was expedited because railroad networks provided better transportation, telegraph provided quick means of sending information. So this was the first time that people at home were receiving news within days or a week of an event. Much different than today when we have instantaneous coverage. We've seen many maps here prepared by professional cartographers but there were also some maps here prepared by individual soldiers. Talk about those for a little bit. Yes one of the ways that people at home would learn about the war is through letters and communications they had with their relatives who were part of the war. One particularly good example is a series of letters written by Henry Ropes. He was a recent graduate of Harvard and he joined the 20th Massachusetts Regiment. He wrote extensive letters home to his father and his brother. They were four or five pages long and he would describe in detail the action of the battles and where they were camped. And occasionally drew maps. One of the maps shows where his regiment was positioned and how they moved through the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia when they were in a battle there. The last letter in this letter book is dated in June of 1863. His regiment is marching north from western Maryland up to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There are no more letters in the book. Henry Ropes was shot by a stray bullet on the morning of the third day while he was performing Morning Watch. And it's reported he was reading a Dickens novel at the time. The very last item in the volume is a map that was prepared in October 1863 when his brother, John C. Ropes, went and visited the Gettysburg battlefield and the officers of the regiment showed him where his brother died. So on this particular map there's a little X that says H.R. died here. It gives us a very personal perspective on the war as opposed to the commercially published maps that we've also seen. Dr. Graham, every war has its winners and its losers and the poster that we're standing in front of now talks about the nation's heroes. Talk about that for a bit. The final section of the exhibition talks about remembering heroes and remembering battles. Heroes are represented in many fashions. Many of the communities throughout our country have monuments to the soldiers that lost their lives from those particular communities. We have posters such as this which honor the military heroes. As we presented this exhibition to school children, we would ask them the question who's missing in this depiction of heroes. As you can see on this particular poster, these are all men. They're all white. They're all military leaders. They're all northern military leaders. But there were many other people who contributed to the war effort. Obviously, all the southern leaders. There are the blacks who helped fight in the war as well. And there are the women and the children at home who prepared slippers and bandages to help the convalescing soldiers in the hospitals. But the histories are written by the winners. Exactly. Dr. Graham, what can these maps tell us that perhaps a historical narrative can't? Well, for me maps are probably a primary way of thinking about a particular event or series of events. Maps allow you to place events in a spatial context. You can read about it in a book, but unless you understand, let's say, the Battle of Gettysburg, how the Union troops occupied Cemetery Ridge, which was the high point of the particular battle and the southern troops were moving across flat lands. It's a little hard to imagine what that particular event was like unless you can see it on a map and relate actions to a physical base. And how long is the exhibition here at the Ocean Map Library? The exhibition has been traveling since it opened in Boston in April of 2011. It's traveled to the Grawyer Club in New York City, Fords Theatre in Washington, D.C. And now it is closing here at the Osher Map Library. It will be on display here at the Osher until August 22nd.