Welcome to Civil War Animated

Click here to see a short video explaining how these animations are made.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good animation is worth ten thousand. After reading book after book about the US Civil War and finding only complicated maps with dotted lines and dashed lines crisscrossing the pages, we decided to depict the key naval and land battles using animation technology.

"this is a surprisingly detailed depiction of the Siege of Petersurg and really well done....The site is really professionally done and will appeal to anyone who is new to a particular battle or campaign.  The moving animation provides a teaching tool which is more difficult with only text and still maps.  I think high school teachers especially will find this page to be very useful in teaching newcomers to the Civil War exactly what happened in these campaigns." TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog.

"I'm in an AP U.S. History class (I'm also a huge fan of history and can't get enough of it) and we were covering the major battles of the Civil War and this website helped me understand the battles by a HUGE factor."Damon Ysmael Navarette

From Free Technology for Teachers blog: "One of my favorite US History resources.....my students absolutely loved the animations complete with their sound effects and marching visuals.'"

From Todd Bryda, Professor of History at Northwestern Connecticut Community College “In the constant battle to keep students interested in the past, History Animated gives teachers a precious resource to fight for the attention of the video game generation.  The maps are visually appealing and represent solid scholarship.  What separates the operators of this site from others isn’t just that they provide a quality product, but they are also open to suggestions, i.e. a compact disk without text for classroom use.  Well done James!”

From a recent article in Armchair General Magazine: "You could read several books and never get the same comprehension of the overall battles as with these animations."

While the animation helps readers view a broader picture of the battles showing the inter-relationships of the opponents in time and space more clearly, it is limited in the detail that can be shown. While accuracy has been attempted, at times the picture of the battles must be simplified to make the battle as clear as possible. We expect to continue developing new animations every few weeks until all of the key battles of the Civil War have been animated.

We are not attempting to reinterpret history, but merely to depict it as the best military historians have written it.