FOR EDUCATORS
For teachers & librarians
Free, source-grounded resources for the military-history classroom — ready-made lesson activities, an open dataset, and embeddable maps.
What the atlas is, in classroom terms
The War Atlas is a structured, source-cited reference covering roughly 3,000 battles across the sweep of military history. Each war and battle is its own page with dates, belligerents, commanders, and an interactive map. Campaigns play back on the map phase by phase, so students can watch a conflict unfold in sequence rather than read it as a wall of text.
The feature that makes it genuinely teachable is its honesty about numbers. Casualty and force figures are shown as ranges with a confidence grade, not as memorizable single facts — so a class can treat history as evidence to weigh rather than totals to recite. It is free, needs no accounts, and carries no ads.
Free for educational use
Everything here is free to use, link, embed, print, and photocopy for any educational purpose — no permission needed, no login, no cost.
- Download the data. The full battles catalogue — dates, coordinates, and source-cited force and casualty ranges — is published as CSV and JSON on the open dataset page under CC BY 4.0. Hand it to students for a spreadsheet exercise, or use it to build your own worksheet.
- Embed a map. Any mapped battle page has an “Embed this map” button that gives you a copy-paste snippet — drop an interactive battle map straight into a slide deck, an LMS page (Canvas, Google Classroom, a LibGuide), or a class website. See any battle page for the button.
- Print the activities.Each activity below is built to print cleanly — use your browser’s Print command (Cmd/Ctrl-P) to get a tidy one- to two-page handout with the site navigation stripped out.
Three classroom activities
Each activity is built around a real feature of the atlas — not a generic worksheet. Every one is free to print and photocopy for class.
Reading a battle through its numbers
Compare source-cited casualty ranges and confidence grades across three Civil War battles, and argue what the uncertainty itself tells us.
High school / undergraduate · 45–60 min
Mapping a campaign
Step through a campaign on the interactive playback map, then annotate a map of your own with its turning points and answer causation questions.
Middle / high school · 40–50 min
Chase the citation
Pick one casualty figure, follow it to the source it rests on, and evaluate that source — learning that historical numbers have provenance.
High school / undergraduate · 30–45 min
How to cite the atlas
If your students reference the atlas in their work, here is how to attribute it. A full-page citation in the major styles — MLA, APA, Chicago, BibTeX — and per-entry formats live on the citation page.
MLA (a specific entry)
“Antietam.” The War Atlas, 2026, https://thewaratlas.co/battles/antietam.
Simple attribution (a slide or handout)
Source: The War Atlas (https://thewaratlas.co)
Corrections & requests
Spotted an error, or want a battle or campaign added for a unit you’re teaching? Corrections from educators are some of the most useful we get — use the contact form.