Resource: The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
Provider: Virginia Center for Digital History and University of Virginia Library
URL: http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/
Review by: Jessica Perea
The Valley of the Shadow website allows the reader to locate and read stories of families during the Civil War era. These families are from the Southern communities and the Northern communities. There are various correspondence, diaries, newspapers, church records, and speeches. These methods of communication of the past seemed to have mostly originated in Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Upon entering the archive, the site visitor has three options to choose from, the eve of the war, the war years, and the aftermath. Each topic is set up in a diagram with subtopics. I clicked on the middle diagram (the war years) and selected the images tab. Here, you can limit your search to a particular battlefield, place, even the name of a soldier. I left all fields blank and hit the search button. There were 774 records in total. On the first page there were soldiers. Alongside these photos was information about them, including their regiment. In the last section, the aftermath, there was a section honoring the memory of those who fought, Memory of the War. Along with the memory, there was a section dedicated to the Freedmen’s Bureau.
See our Archive of Past Resources of the Week.
Reviews of teaching resources are for informational purposes only and do not imply endorsement by the Center for History Teaching & Learning, the UTEP History Department, or the University of Texas at El Paso. Reviews are published during the academic year.
