The era of the American Civil War was truly a time of great change. The war itself was the great climax of a century long stalemate of an increasingly divided nation; a conflict that pitted northern free state interests against southern slave state interests. The war was staged on a very grand scale and as such there are a great deal of historic documents, which detail the conflict, available to anyone willing to search for them; everything from personal letters of correspondence to military records. Also because there was such a divide in the values of those involved and affected by the conflict, there was no shortage of newspaper articles being printed about the conflict and offering opinions on who was right and who was wrong. The website titled In the Valley of the Shadow, funded by the University of Virginia Library and the Virginia Center for Digital History, attempts to scale down the war and show through historic archive of these resources how different and how similar life was for two different counties before, during, and after the Civil War. The two counties, Franklin County Pennsylvania and Augusta County Virginia, are located in the same valley and share the same natural resources, but both are located on opposite sides of the Union/Confederate divide. The resources available through the website provide the user with a rich and intimate portrait of these two places and allow the user to actively engage the geography, economy, society, and political issues of the time which divided these two otherwise very similar places.
The Valley Project began with a proposal by Edward L. Ayers in September of 1991. Ayers, who is now the President of the University of Richmond and is an historian of the American South, had originally intended the project to be a traditional book which compared life in a northern and southern location. Once the implementation of the World Wide Web took over, it was clear the Valley Project would make use of this vast new resource. The project was slowly pieced together over the course of the next decade. The Valley Project amassed thousands of letters, diaries, memoirs, census records, church records, government records, battle reports, speeches, and newspapers and digitized them, creating a fast, easy to use archival database which would allow users from all over to make use of the records previously only available to those who could travel to Virginia and Pennsylvania. Ayers did publish the book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, based off of the finding of the Valley Project.
While the Valley Project website is almost exclusively an archival database it does offer a few teaching resources to scholars planning on teaching about the Civil War. Teachers can have their students review newspaper articles to see how papers in the North and in the South put their own spin on events. Students can review slave owner wills to see what happened to slaves when their owners died, they can also review newspapers to review causes of death in the 1850s and 60s. Actually the teaching resources available through the site are very extensive. It would make a great addition to any classroom project.
The site is very easy to access and very well organized. It is organized into three main categories; The Eve of War, The War Years, and the Aftermath. Each category contains seven or eight subcategories like Letters and Diaries, Newspapers, maps and images, Census, solider, and veteran records, Church records and freedman Bureau records, and statistics of before and after the war. The quality of these resources is very good. Each resource is giving a brief introduction. Very little historical interpretation is implemented, beyond what can be reasonably assumed with the primary source. For instance, under the state category Industry Using Slave Labor a brief introduction is given, stating that slaveholders in Augusta Virginia predominated in low skill industry like distilleries and flour mills, as oppose to artisans such as blacksmiths and coopers who rarely owned slaves. One might further interpret that the reasoning behind this was that artisans refused to remain in such close proximity to their slaves while men of industry could separate themselves from the laboring population, however the website doesn’t make any assumptions or interpretations of this sort. The same is basically true of the website as a whole. Interpretation is left to those studying the archives, rather than those that have assembled it. For this reason alone, the website caters more to scholars and academics than to the majority of the population. So the target audience is that of historian, professors, and the young scholars attempting to break into the field of American history.
The strengths of the archive lie in its ability to compare both counties from one another, but also the counties compared with itself before and after and during the war. What demographic, economic, and political changes did the populations of these counties go through as a result of the American Civil War? As a student of history I can check the party affiliation differences between those in the southern county and those in the northern county. 72% of registered Augusta County Virginia activists were actually Whigs and only 28% were democrats. 57% of the Franklin County Pennsylvania activists were Democrats, and 43% were Republicans, according to the 1860 records. There are countless demographic and societal statistics like this one could verify while using the sight resources. It is very easy to access this information which is all in one place. It is truly an invaluable resource to young scholars.
There are several drawbacks to the site however. The scope is highly limited. The demographic statistics that are true in the case of these border towns are almost certainly not true of most other areas in the Union or Confederacy. The website really can’t be used to represent entire areas of the population as the resources almost all evaluate on an individual basis and not on American society as a whole. However the aim of the site is not to provide the user with a broad scale of statistics, rather an intimate portrait of these two counties. Also, the way in which the church and military records portion of the website is set up is rather limited. It is essentially a search database, and in order to search anything you must first have a name to search. However this obstacle can overcome if the user first searches the diaries and letters archive which lists authors by name, and correspondingly searchers the author’s name in the church and military records archive.
In closing I would just like to say that I very much enjoyed the website and found it to be very useful. While limited in scope and targeted to a specific audience, the functioning of the website is impeccable and the value of its documents is limitless. As we progress further into another era of great change in American history, one can only hope that our limitless resources are used to produce more things of value, such as this website, which help to further our academic interpretations of the past.
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