Clio Wired (History 696)

Edward Ayers, Professor at the University of Virginia, originally planned to write a traditional book comparing two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line in the antebellum, war-time, and postwar era of the Civil War. As his archival collection and modern computer technology grew, the original book turned into The Valley of the Shadow website created by the Center for New Digital History. The Valley is an impressive work of scholarly research presented in digital form. The website itself offers an archive of information about two communities, August County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania during the period surrounding the Civil War. Included in the website are articles written by Edward Ayers and William Thomas about the reasons to compare two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, and some conclusions to be drawn about the influence of slavery or the absence of slavery in these communities. The main emphasis of the website is to present archival information about the communities to a large audience for research and teaching.

The web designers created a master floor plan with three octagons representing the three time periods-- The Eve of War, The War Years, and The Aftermath-- as the home page and guide around the website. They refer to the website as a “research library in a box,” and the familiar octagons appear at the bottom of linked pages providing a handy visual guide for the unfamiliar user wandering around the library. The website is fairly easy to navigate with clearcut links and a help section for each area whether you’re searching through newspaper articles or census records. The help sections include suggestions, guidelines, and tools for searching the databases such as case-sensitive items and wild card options %. These are necessary as the user can get lost wandering through the shelves of the library or links in the website. The Letters and Diaries section requires several very informative links to get to the letters and diaries containing family information, but it’s easy to get bogged down or lost in the process. My computer couldn’t pull up the letters themselves, but I was able to read the summary of the letter in the link before it.

The map section, especially in The War Years, is excellent. By moving the project from traditional print to digital and web capability, Dr. Ayers is able to actively show the progression of the military units from the two counties on a map with a time line. Arrows move across the map from battle to battle in the same way the military units moved during the war. Another arrow at the bottom of the page moves simultaneously across a timeline to give a frame of reference to the battles. It’s the kind of Civil War action that teenage boys are drawn to, but it gives any user the geographical perspective on how many miles the troops moved between battles. The designers created a side bar to the maps with the possibility of adding modern cities, historical towns, roads, railroads, and rivers with the click of a mouse. This gives the user the option of looking at the maps historically or with a backward glance from modern times.

The teaching sections of the website are well done as well. The Valley of the Shadow is a remarkable resource for teachers K-12, and providing lesson plans for each individual level encourages teachers to use the website. Any teacher with access to the web can utilize The Valley of the Shadow because the academic staff at the University of Virginia has made it quick and accessible. It is a vast resource of materials, but today’s students with find clicking around on the web more engaging than walking through stacks of books.

The Valley of the Shadow provides the user with a number of ways to engage the website as a teaching tool, or archival research on topics ranging from finding family members to chronological progression of a particular military unit to statistics about the literacy of the communities. Any research project has limitations and the Valley of the Shadow makes it clear to the user that it is only including the August and Franklin counties in this Civil War history. The Valley of the Shadow is an extensive archival repository of information made accessible to a larger audience by presenting it in digital form on the web.