My name is Andrew Higgins and I am currently a senior at Keene State. I am majoring in History with a minor in Environmental Studies. In my free time, I like to play sports and I’m currently the Captain of the Ultimate Frisbee Team. A friend of mine and I began interviewing draft-eligible college athletes during the start of COVID to hopefully watch one of them get drafted and since then have interviewed many professional athletes from the MLB and NFL​.

Transportation/Railroads and the advancements and strategies that led to the downfall of the souths railroad system while the norths continued to flourish. I want to focus on the railroads located in the Confederate states. Finding letters and newspapers that might show propaganda about Union soldiers destroying railroads or evidence of tracks being destroyed by Union soldiers and possibly by confederate soldiers/southern civilians. There are many photographs of railroads destroyed with captions claiming union sabotage but documents to generals about such acts are what I’m interested in pursuing. Many people say that the installation and upkeep of railroads was the main factor in why the Union won due to ease and abundance of manufacturing. I’ve already found that Just North Carolina spent 3/4 of its capital to build these roads and used at least two different sized gauges meaning that the track from the coast couldn’t connect to the track from the west or south so people would have to change tracks to get across the state and limiting transportation of goods across the state Finding out what different methods of transportation might’ve been considered when the south began to realize the railroads would not sustain them. The importance of other forms of transportation like the steamboat, etc., and possibly find how access or the inability to use the railroads led to different strategies when preparing for battle.