Unredacted: Civil War

The war over slavery, taught from the documents the men who started it wrote down. Unredacted: Civil War is a four-year curriculum: 100 lessons from the territorial crisis of 1846 to the end of Reconstruction in 1877. It teaches the war as a war over slavery, because that is what the people who started it said it was. The declarations of causes and the secession commissioners are quoted at length in Year 1, in their own words, and the app returns to them whenever a later claim about states' rights needs testing against the documents of 1860 and 1861. It also teaches four million enslaved people as actors rather than as the war's subject matter. Self emancipation began before the Proclamation and made it enforceable, and the app follows that sequence in the order it happened, which is the reverse of the order the popular account gives. It ends in 1877 rather than 1865, because the…