The Civil War on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites, by William G. Thomas and Alice E. Carter, Scholarly Resources, 800-772-8937, 220 pages, with CD-ROM, $55.00 hardcover, $18.95 softcover.
THERE ARE MORE THAN 600,000 Civil War-related sites on the Web. If you have an Internet connection, that means most of the information you need about the war is right at your fingertips. Of course, if you own a piano, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is right there, too.
As anyone who’s been on the Web knows, researchers can fritter away precious hours scanning page after meaningless page to find just a few pieces of useful information. Sure, there are professionally produced Civil War-history sites that cover everything from genius on the battlefield to hardship on the home front, but they tend to get lost in the swirl of inaccurate, distorted, and crassly opinionated pages that litter cyberspace. Search engines can help you home in on a specific topic, but they can’t tell good from bad.
For advice on finding quality sites, you can turn to a new guide by William Thomas and Alice Carter that aims to help serious researchers and casual browsers find what they’re looking for about the war. In compiling the book, Thomas and Carter examined and evaluated thousands of sites and chose the top 95. This cream of the crop is arranged under eight broad subject categories, and each site is rated from one to five stars in the categories of content, aesthetics, and navigation. A CD-ROM that comes with the book includes links to the best sites.
If you buy only one book this year on the Civil War, The Civil War on the Web should be it.
Dominic J. Caraccilo
Fort Benning, Georgia