About This Site

In January 1998, student intern S. P. Kalita and I began devising this site to support a course I planned to teach in the fall, America's Civil War.   My original goal was to create an electronic archive of primary documents regarding the causes, character, and consequences of the Civil War, expecting that students in my course would benefit from having quick and easy on-line access to these materials.   The Director of the University of the South's Center for Teaching, Professor Sherwood Ebey, encouraged my efforts, assigned S. P. as my assistant, and arranged for computing facilities, hardware, and software to aid the project. 

Somewhere along the way, it mushroomed into much more.   Attending Dr. Ebey's seminars on active learning, I began to consider how the web site might contribute to a broader reconsideration of my teaching style.   Discussing what we expected of students with other Sewanee professors, I became convinced that undergraduates here are not well served by a steady diet of lecture courses and traditional seminars (even when tasty asides and tempting digressions are added to the mix).   Considering the data gathered by Caren Rosser in her survey of Sewanee students' learning styles, I wondered how much of any course's content was being truly learned, and how much was merely memorized until the close of the semester.   It seemed worthwhile, even necessary, to explore other avenues of teaching and learning. 

This web site is a first, tentative step in that exploration.   If it works, the documents, images, and structure of the site will support active learning by students and instructor;  we will employ these resources to construct our shared (and perhaps, divergent) interpretations of what happened in mid-nineteenth century America, why, and to what consequence.   Classes will be framed with brief lectures (10 to 15 minutes at the beginning and end of sessions), but meetings will be most concerned with questioning our sources and evaluating our interpretations.   The latest technology will thus be joined with the Socratic method and other means of engagement. 

A note on the contents of the site, and their optimum use:   the Syllabus page will direct you to each day's texts via the indented links;  the meeting's title line links to the Questions of the Day page for that session's discussions.   To best access the material, go first to the Syllabus, then to the Questions, then to the individual documents and images.   The Documents page provides another avenue for approaching the texts, as does the Maps page.   The Research Links page offers additional resources for those who want to explore specfic topics in greater depth, as well as those planning an essay for the course.   Regular users of the site should reload these core pages frequently:   additional material will be added throughout the fall, and the page design S. P. and I began the site with in January will be altered slightly as time allows. 

Suggestions, corrections, and comments are welcome;  please use the E-mail icon at the bottom right of any page to send them along. 

Finally, a disclaimer--this document and others linked to it through the America's Civil War World Wide Web site are produced and made available for the non-profit educational use of students at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.   Visitors to these pages are enjoined against copyright infringement or for-profit applications. 

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