Brief Overview of the Civil War

In this blog I wanted to explore the possibilities of how being involved in the war.  War in general is known for being a traumatizing experience, often times affecting the way people go through life. I don't think James Henry Bread was an exception.  I couldn't find much on Bread's life during the war so I decided to focus on discussing Civil War in general.

The actual causes of the Civil War are widely debated, however it can be summarized into three causes.  State Rights, Slavery, and Political/Economic considerations, though slavery has an effect on the other two.

The Civil War had the most lost of American lives out of any war in history.  Life on an American solider during the civil war was a hard one, like the life of any solider in any war.  It required them to be away from their love ones for intensive training just to get into the battle-field.  They often had to deal with inadequate food or shelter, deal through disease, and traverse through various degrees of weather while traveling with their heavy bags simply so their lives could be some-what bearable.

This is not including the stress they went through in the battlefield.  Times in the Civil War went between long periods of time with nothing to sheer terror from the battlefield and occasionally from a surprise attack.  Going between these extremes must of had terrible amounts of stress to the soldiers.  Surely, never knowing when they could be attacked next must only added on to this stress.

The Civil War was a long prolonged out War.  Both sides expected it to end swiftly but both sides were fairly equal in strength and ability which only dragged out the battle further.  The Civil War took place in a time when more modern tactics of battle were being adopted.  Efficiency played more of a role in this war than in wars of the past due to advancing technology and as a result, more chivalrous and honorable methods of the past were abandoned.

The information I used to wright this were all found on this site, it contains more detail information and of individual battles but I didn't have the time to explore it to deeply to see if there was information in here that would provide useful to us:
http://www.civilwar.com/

This link will take you directly to the Battle section of the site, in case anyone is interested in looking more into the battles of the civil war themselves.
http://www.civilwar.com/battles/battle-summaries.html

Fun Theory

So in relation to our project, I think we could make going to the museum more fun if we integrated a QR scanning system into it.  We could create a program where people could have avatars that directly interacted with the different portraits on display in a digital sense.  As a potential example, QR codes could be set-up next to each of the paintings within the museum.  As users explored the museum they could scan the various QR codes to get them to appear on your device then they could explore the painting with their avatar and it could interact with portions of the painting.  For example, with the war painting we had to work with, the avatar could freak out when it approached the skeleton, or give a blanket to the people lying down.  In the window view painting it could look at the photographs, perhaps as a receptionist at the desk who the people in the photos were.

The avatars could be customizable too and you could earn points to buy accessories for them by scanning the QR codes of various displays at the museum.  Within each of the paintings there could be a trivia section were you could answer questions for the chance to earn more points or exclusive accessory prizes.  Maybe they could even mix and match content from various paintings they explore to make their own custom art display to share with their friends.   They could even get their friends together and explore paintings with their avatars together.  They could interact with each other while inside a painting as well as the environment they were in.