"Torn in Two", Civil War Exhibit @ the Boston Public Library

A great struggle recalled.  (Boston Globe, 5/12/2011)

Excerpt:    The collection, which opens to the public today, seeks to illuminate the war through an array of maps, political cartoons, newspaper front pages and other materials from the time and underlines the critical importance of geography in the war and how the public followed it. While newspapers rarely printed maps before the war, more than 2,000 maps appeared in daily newspapers in the North during the war, spurred by advances in printing technologies.

Three years in the making, the exhibit is divided into three sections. The first examines the tensions between the Northern and Southern states in the years before the war, the second documents the conflict itself, and the third focuses on how the war was remembered and how the war-torn country commemorated the battles and honored the dead.

“We want people to get a sense of the whole story,’’ said Ronald Grim, curator of the library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, which organized the exhibit. “During the Civil War, maps became a major way of illustrating the battles.’’

The exhibit will run through the end of the year before heading to New York.