This cylinder offers an exciting and innovative approach to teaching Civil War history through astronomy. It features a colorful aurora borealis, a series of comets that were common in the mid-nineteenth century including Swift-Tuttle, Tebbutt, and Enck as well as several meteor showers, a zodiacal light, and the vertical alignment of the planets in 1862. It is complemented by a curriculum entitled The Celestial Relationships in the American Civil War by Bernice-Marie Yates, Ph.D. with ten interdisciplinary student activities that demonstrate the relationships between history, astronomy, science, fine arts, geography, language arts and computer technology.