| Web Site Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Web Site Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Web Site Reviews

Roy Rosenzweig
Contributing Editor

With this issue, the Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web <http://historymatters.gmu.edu>, inaugurates regular reviews of Web sites. Given the joint sponsorship of this new feature, the reviews will appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at <http://www.historycooperative.org>) and at History Matters. That site, which is a joint production of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, serves as a gateway to Web resources and offers materials for teaching United States history.

To launch our Web site reviews, the articles section of this issue features Gary J. Kornblith's in-depth consideration of the Web site and CD-ROM of The Valley of the Shadow.

The Web reviews are edited by Roy Rosenzweig; please contact him at <rrosenzw@gmu.edu> if you would like to write a review or suggest a site for review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/jah>.

Do History <http://www.DoHistory.org>. Created and maintained by the Film Study Center at Harvard University. Reviewed Jan. 1–15, 2001.

Imagine a Home Depot for historians. After browsing aisles piled with raw materials and receiving expert advice from a well-trained staff, could the do-it-yourselfer craft an elegant book or a compelling documentary? Yes, answers Do History, a superb online resource that invites visitors to explore the process of "piecing together the lives of ordinary people," in this case, of the eighteenth-century Maine midwife Martha Ballard. Experimental and interactive, the aptly named Do History aims to provide users with the tools to rebuild the past from scratch. 1

Intent upon making us think about how we know what we know, Do History is both a teaching tool and an archive. As a case study of the writing of A Midwife's Tale (1990), Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's award-winning narrative of Ballard's life, and of the development of Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's acclaimed 1998 film based on the book, it is also part fanzine, with material that prime-time television might hawk as "The Making of A Midwife's Tale." Both book and movie have deservedly won ardent admirers (myself among them). Still, I wonder how much visitors to the site will learn from reading Ulrich's 1981 National Endowment for the Humanities proposal for the project, much less her 1991 Bancroft Prize acceptance speech. . . .

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