Venturing into the Civil War,
Virtually: A Review

Gary J. Kornblith

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2>. Created and maintained by Edward L. Ayers et al., University of Virginia and the Virginia Center for Digital History. Reviewed Nov. 29, 2000–Jan. 16, 2001.
Few scholarly Web sites have received the popular acclaim accorded The Valley of the Shadow. Yahoo! Internet Life has awarded it four stars, and Lycos, a portal Web site, has named it a "Top 5% Website." The Encyclopedia Britannica, Education World, and EDSITEment have included it in their lists of best Web sites, and last summer the New York Times devoted a lengthy article to the Valley of the Shadow Project in its weekly "Circuits" section. Professional historians have also singled out The Valley of the Shadow for praise. Writing in the June 1997 issue of this journal, Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig judged it "probably the most sophisticated historical site on the Web." The competition has grown in the intervening period, but the Valley's reputation remains secure. In 2001 the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College awarded its creators the first electronic Lincoln Prize. Indeed, although the Valley site is less than ten years old and still under construction, by Internet standards it qualifies for the encomium "venerable." 1	1
Conceived as an experiment in digital history before "www" became a common mode of address in American culture, The Valley of the Shadow now stands as proof that the World Wide Web offers remarkable opportunities and important challenges to practitioners of the historian's craft in the postmodern era. Whether the result will be a radically new kind of nonsequential or multisequential history, as some theorists of hypertext narrative suggest, remains to be seen. But for researchers and teachers alike, The Valley of the Shadow represents an important electronic alternative to both brick-and-mortar archives and printed source books of primary documents. It serves as a laboratory for exploring the possibilities and limitations of a rapidly evolving medium that promises to transform how we do history and how we present history to diverse audiences, academic and nonacademic.	. . .