The Virtual War

It has become almost a cliché to describe the explosion of the World Wide Web and its implications for historical teaching and scholarship as a revolution. Yet the hyperbole holds more than a grain of truth. In the several years since the Internet exploded into public consciousness, the Web has changed the ways in which people interact with the past, and nowhere does this seem truer than in the field of Civil War. Plug "United States Civil War" into any search engine and tens of thousands of hits come up, links to pages for reenactors, genealogists, students, teachers, researchers, and, in the great American tradition, consumers. Surfers can find information ranging from family letters and photographs, to battle maps, to student essays, to opportunities to purchase everything from battlefield souvenirs to present-day kitsch. Such a vast network of information is virtually impossible to navigate, and this is one of the most profound problems with this new technology. Everything is relative on the World Wide Web; everything is accorded the same weight (though some new search engines have begun to rank sites by popularity as a mark of relative utility). What is an historian to do?

Electronic media (primarily the World Wide Web but CD-ROMs and enhanced digital television as well) at its best can change the ways in which we understand the past, making connections visible, allowing for the layering of images, text, and sound, enhancing the presentation of both ideas as well as information. In his essay "Can You Do Serious History on the Web?" Carl Smith defines "serious history" as "original work that is based on the best primary evidence, is aware of other research, and makes a group of sustained points about its subject." ¹ While Smith's definition is perhaps too narrow, excluding the many sites that provide original documents without much explication, in setting such a high standard it implicitly demands that electronic history be taken seriously. The ease with which text and images can be uploaded to the web, with no need for peer review or proofreading, the perceived speed at which the electronic world is moving, should not be a defense for sloppy thinking, writing, or production.

Many sites on the web are collections of links to other pages, functioning as sorts of indexes or bibliographies. This review explores three "clearinghouse" sites that purport to be central gateways to the Civil War on the web. These gateway sites are the product of individual labors, university centers, and commercial entities, but they all share certain strengths and weaknesses. Three of the most often requested and linked pages about the Civil War are

• The United States Civil War Center, at Louisiana State University. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu
  
• The American Civil War Homepage, at the University of Tennessee. http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war
  
• The Civil War Index Page, maintained by Jim Janke, a business management professor at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. http://www.homepages. dsu.edu/jankej/civilwar/civilwar.htm ²

The American Civil War Homepage was one of the first of the gateway sites, originally launched with thirty links in February 1995 as a project in University of Tennessee's School of Information Sciences (which continues to maintain it). The ACW Homepage argues that its links provide "a sense of history, transcending the stale recitation of dates and facts and alive with meaning," and that "the links gathered in this Homepage are a metaphor for the interconnections of the War's past with our present and future." These are grand claims, which this site cannot quite achieve. The site design simply consists of one long page subdivided into thirteen categories, including "Images of Wartime," "Documentary Records," and "Histories and Bibliographies." Fully half of the list is devoted to various military aspects of the war, found under the headings of either "Battles & Campaigns," "Rosters & Regimental Histories," and "Other Military Information."

Organizationally, the site design is clear, but a bit frustrating. First, because the site consists of...