The Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County has undertaken a project to visually and virtually recreate the way that Washington, DC looked like in 1814. One of the problems facing Visualizing Early Washington DC is a lack of reliable visual history resources. Slowly the project is taking shape. You can see one aspect of the project in the interactive panoramic image below. The image is a mash-up of a sketch of Notley Young’s Plantation and current 2011 imagery.

Notley Young’s Plantation Location 2, Test 1 in Washington DC in Washington, DC

I learned about this neat project from the following video that I saw posted on Open Culture. Watch the video below to learn more about how this project is being put together.

Visualizing Early Washington DC from ircumbc on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
This project is a great example of what can be done through combining historical documents, images, and maps with modern mapping and modeling technology. Your students could do something similar and virtually reconstruct a historical view of their communities. To do this students could do the research online or at a local historical society then construct a virtual recreation using Google SketchUp and Google Earth.