One Beautiful Attempt to Fit the US Civil War into a Single Chart

Amazing. Under "other states", I noticed a few minor engagements in "CA". I wondered if I had read that right - California?

This ended up bringing me to an article[1] about California's involvement in the Civil War, a state that I had previously written off as uninvolved in the conflict. Not only was there a significant union fort in what is now Los Angeles, but they had camels(!?) for desert operations.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/heralding...

Compressing the two spatial dimensions of a map into the x-axis and using the y-axis for time is in fact a beautiful way to present events over time and space. I needed to do this in a project a few weeks ago and I don't know why this didn't occur to me. This is so much better than a dynamic map with a time slider.

http://wigwags.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/review-of-history-sh... is Edward Tufte's take on Larry Gormley's similar infographic analysis of the same event.

I noticed an odd omission in the tables at the bottom of the chart:

Statistics (Federal) No. of Men Enlisted 2,850,000

Statistics (Confederate) No. of Men Enlisted <blank>

I wonder why why the number of Confederate men enlisted was not shown.

The word beautiful is starting to lose all meaning.

I have this poster hanging on my wall. It's a great reminder of two things: 1. you CAN pack a lot of information in a single piece. 2. you rarely, if ever SHOULD pack this much information into a single piece. "A beautiful attempt" is a really good way to characterize it.

interesting that in 1897, they thought that "gold value of paper money" was an important metric.