Website Evaluation

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/
Directed by Edward L. Ayers with the Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia
Reviewed 12-15 September 2002

Edward L. Ayers, the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia, made a leap of faith ten years ago. He decided not to follow his traditional study, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), with a conventional tome investigating the two Shenandoah Valley communities of Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania before, during, and after the Civil War. Instead, Ayers chose, like the venture capitalists of the 1990s, the brave new world of the Web as his platform for presenting an historical topic. The Valley of the Shadow website has been evolving since its first posting over five years ago and has proven the value of the Web as a resource for historical research. Ayers is certainly not afraid of democracy and allowing history to be placed on the web “where no one regulates access, no gatekeeping organizations police content or methodology.” http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/e1/bravenewworld1.html#

Ayers set his sights high when defining his site’s objective:

“Taken together the three parts of the Valley Project will offer a resource of unparalleled depth, complexity, and breadth. Teachers, scholars, students, and the general public will have a living archive that encompasses the largest problems in American history, presenting not answers for easy consumption but rather open avenues for investigation.”
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/choosepart.html#story

The site is organized chronologically into three sections: the eve of the Civil War, the war years, and the aftermath. But this linear trajectory transforms to a gateway approach using an octagonal-shaped icon to provide rooms or nodes for further exploration. For example, in the eve of the war section, the researcher by choosing the reference center node could read a narrative on the impending crisis, or find bibliographical or related website lists. The introductory essay leads to a link on other topics such as John Brown, where we learn, through text and illustrations, about the chronology leading up to his raid and about who his co-conspirators were. But while focusing on this event in Harpers Ferry, the website continuously relates outside occurrences with the two communities under study. In this case, the site records what the Staunton, Va., and Chambersburg, Pa., newspapers were reporting, and that the West Augusta Guard were ordered to serve as peacekeepers during John Brown’s trial.

If one chose the link to the election of 1860, the site presents the voting results within the national context of the free and slave states but also compares the national voting with the precinct voting in Augusta and Franklin counties. The narrative is succinct but comprehensive and the bibliographic sources used run the gamut from nineteenth and twentieth century historical studies to current theses on specific topics. The reader is not left adrift in a sea of data because the authors explain what primary sources (such as public records, letters, diaries, and images) they use and why. For instance, they culled the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and found that the Broadfoot Publishing Company’s CD-ROM version was the most useful.

While the scholarship is first-rate and the site is well-organized, there are minor technical problems. As a work-in-progress the authors are continuously updating their material but they have not revised their introductory essay on the “Story behind the Valley Project” since 2001 and it is unclear what material is for sale. In the section on the Project Staff and Background (updated January 2001), the entry for Ayers says he is working on the book; the book and CD-ROM were published in August 2001. The site should include homepage navigation buttons so the reader does not have to resort to the “back” arrow. It has a variety of navigational tools--the site title, arrows, and red buttons. After perusing the site over several days, I found that some links (often to specific text in the war years) were not available on the server. The introductory essay said that the project expected to finish the Civil War Years in 2001. In that actual section, however, we are told that some of the data is not complete. The authors need to update their prefatory material.

Although the authors have stipulated a wide audience from the general public to scholars, they predominantly focus on students from middle school to college. The lesson plans for social studies classes (Grades 7-12) and the U.S. history paper topics for high school and college students are extensive and well-conceived. O’Malley and Rosenzweig summed up well one of the positive attributes of the Web: “For anyone interested in how the past is used in the present, the Web is a unique resource. It can allow fascinating assignments that illustrate to students that the past is not dead and forgotten but actively and diversely used.” http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/e1/bravenewworld2.html
The Valley website is an interactive site that offers teachers the site’s tools to teach their students. But it also engages students (in the University of Virginia’s HIUS 403, Digital History and the American Civil War class) to post a specific topic for the Valley Project. One student project followed the African Americans who served with the U.S. Colored Troops from Franklin County. Using primary source material from public records, letters and diaries, newspapers, and contemporary images, these students contributed new scholarship to African American studies. Students can view, use, and contribute to The Valley of the Shadow site.

Is this new media more a tangled web of distraction and a blind alley than a utopia for historians? Professor Vernon Takeshita, Dartmouth College, wrote in 2001 that: “The Web is the wrong place for students to begin their historical research.” http://www.dartmouth.edu/~history/newsletter/spring01/web.html
Perhaps. It depends on what sites they are using and for what purposes. The Valley of the Shadow was conceived as a website from its inception and therefore its conceptualization was rooted in the new media rather than the old. This site culls primary source material from many repositories and contextualizes them with brief but cogent prefatory essays. Almost everything in this site (but not the interactive theater maps) could have been done in a printed documentary editing series, but the Web permits wider audience access and greater ease of manipulating huge files at a much lower cost than the print medium could ever deliver.

This web site is a good place for students to learn about what primary sources. The authors provided details on how to read nineteenth century newspapers and how they differed from today’s. This is a research tool I learned on my own over time; these authors have provided it gratis. It would take years for a scholar to discover all the material contained in the site. With the material identified, one can delve deeper into a subject and provide the analysis and interpretation that Dr. Takeshita laments is so devoid from the Web. You need to start with a database before you can write the narrative and the Web can provide this as shown by The Valley of the Shadow. This site has supplied the tools for students to make critical evaluations through its well-ordered structure. The seeds for many journal articles are here.

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