About the Project

The House Divided Project at Dickinson College aims to create resources for teachers and students that will help bring alive and explain the turbulent Civil War era in American history.  Using Dickinson College as a both a window and a starting point, the House Divided Project hopes to find in the stories of thousands of individuals a way to help illustrate how the Civil War came, why it was fought so bitterly, and ultimately how the nation survived.  Dickinson College offers a powerful platform for this examination because the school was unique for the era with a student body about evenly divided between northerners and southerners and with a network of graduates who were particularly influential, including both a president and a chief justice in the years just before the war came.   Relying on an interdisciplinary team of professors, staff and students, we hope to bring together cutting-edge technology with the best customs of traditional historical scholarship.