If you think Digital Humanities is exclusive lemme tell you about being a woman in Military History and more narrowly, a woman pursuing Military Theory. There are very few women military writers, most of them write about having spouses in the military, the home-front, or affairs with generals. Let’s narrow down the field a bit more to women that write about military history, and even then we don’t talk about hard military tactics (unless you’re Jennifer Murray, I love you and your work and you inspire me every day). Now let’s narrow it EVEN FARTHER into women that study military theory. Me. Now let me say that again for y’all in the back: THERE ARE NO PROMINENT WOMEN MILITARY THEORISTS. You have people like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Jomini.
What I am doing, while not “hard” military theory like artillery and weapon movements and troop formations, it shows the social side of war. Because we often forget that war, as Clausewitz so famously puts it “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale”. It is organized murder for a cause of a government or non-governmental organization. This affects the human psyche in so many ways as expanded upon in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman (which has honestly changed my life and my outlook of warfare).
These young men, barely out of their teenage years were thrust into a war against their own countrymen to fight for the future of a nation, North or South.
This project is different, it is revolutionary in the sense that it deals with an aspect of war that is not discussed often. It is revolutionary in the way that it is a resource on military history that is interactive and open to the public free of charge and free of any elitist military vocabulary. It is revolutionary in the way that it is done by a 19 year-old female civilian.
The field of military history is changing with West Point leading the charge by digitizing their textbook, which is basically just a huge digital project now. It gives the experience that users did not have before such as 3-D models of guns, ships, and other weaponry, interactive battle maps, etc. While my project does not have all those fancy thingamajigs, it does have interactive elements to be more hands-on with the knowledge. It has visualizations to better display the information. I have videos and wikipedia pages and links to other pages of information on every battle so that even those who do not know what happened at the battle of Gettysburg can learn more not only about the battle, but about the men who fought in it.
I want people who would not usually be interested in the Civil War or in military history to look at this project and not only understand what happened to the cadets, but to feel for them. And also to show that anyone can do military history.
-Julia
