Many Internet fads — the single-serving blog, the YouTube mash-up and commenting “first” on a news story — have passed strangely through American consciousness. Few deserve the attention they receive, but the New York Times, with its online series “Disunion,” has managed to marry the power of old media with the potential of the new and should be a blueprint for traditional media as it grapples with a more difficult era.
“Disunion” is a daily chronicle of the early days of the Civil War. The Times cobbles together items from its pages, photos and maps from hundreds of old sources, and the comments of historians to create a day-by-day recollection of the course of the war, 150 years ago exactly.
The series is full of those little fragments of life that often escape most treatments of historical events.
While many books of history create a narrative through selection, “Disunion” creates the equivalent of a historical blog feed. Events unfold as they happened. While there is some curator involvement — historians write introductions to many of the news items — the real stars are the stories.
And what stories. One item, from a New York Times retrospective on Abraham Lincoln from 1932, uses a first-person account from a reporter who was with Lincoln on the day he was elected in November 1860. Its portrait of the president-elect is nuanced and shows us a vibrant, joking Lincoln, who is nevertheless solemn when he considers the magnitude of the looming task before him.
“Disunion” is an encouraging step in the continuing evolution of online information. But this is not the first attempt of its kind. The Atlantic has made many old features available online, and the Library of Congress in 2008 made thousands of old photos from its collection available online through Flickr for viewing, downloading and further use.
It’s worth noting that while the Internet made this project possible, the archives of the New York Times were essential as well. Many fans of the democratization of the news have cheered the weaknesses of the traditional media. While they are right to celebrate the emergence of new voices, and the resulting improvements in the speed and veracity of news reports, the “Disunion” project shows just how important the assets of the old media will be in this new era. The institutional memory and archival power of the Times, when harnessed by the Internet, can be incredibly useful.
“Disunion” will not solve the New York Times’ financial woes, or those of print media, but it represents a promising way to relate to the Internet. Rather than competing with Twitter and Google in speed and aggregation, older news sources should deliver what they deliver best: Detailed reporting, talented opinion-writing, and features, like “Disunion,” that take advantage of the wealth of historical information at their disposal.
Reading the old stories is sobering. This country endured so much; its bonds pulled almost to the point of breaking. America’s survival is a tribute to its — our — incredible resilience. People like us survived a bloody and brutal war, began to right an old wrong, and held a nation together when the far easier thing would have been to let it crumble. We face debt and divisiveness and the prospect of decline, but if they made it, so can we. Maybe that’s the point of “Disunion.”
Reach the reporter at wmunsil@asu.edu
