While our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the inevitable triumph of the free-labor North over the slave-based South, Edward L. Ayers tells a different story. Using the records of the Valley Archive, Ayers charts the descent of two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, into war. Neither wanted the war, but they nevertheless threw themselves into it with startling intensity. Following the lives of Valley residents throughout the conflict, Ayers tells the story of the war through the ravaged lives, difficult choices, and profound uncertainty that confronted Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

This digital article based on the Valley Project is aimed at a central issue in American history: how slavery divided American society and culture in the years before the Civil War. This close study of two communities near the Mason-Dixon Line shows that slavery created critical differences, some obvious and some more subtle, between Northern and Southern communities that otherwise shared many attributes. Both the differences and the similarities are crucial in understanding the political crisis that brought on the American Civil War.

Two Communities in the Civil War: A Norton Casebook in History

This selection of documents offers an insightful look at one Northern and one Southern community only 200 miles apart in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War. The casebook focuses on the deep connections between homefront and battlefront and on the centrality of slavery to the conflict, emphasizing the profound uncertainty and confusion that prevailed during the war.

Winner of the 2001 e-Lincoln Prize from Gettysburg College, this CD-ROM of the Valley project explores Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, in the years leading up to the Civil War. Taking full advantage of the digital medium, the CD-ROM presents a vast archive of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, military records, maps, images, and music.

Download the Free Valley CD Update for Windows XP

These projects represent the work of six teams of students at the University of Virginia in HIUS 403 "Digital History and the American Civil War." The projects are fully developed web sites on a topic of importance for the Valley Project. Enter any one of these to find original material--letters, photographs, diaries and records of the Civil War.