NEH funding helped Edward Ayers create one of the first online digital humanities projects, The Valley of the Shadow. Image courtesy of Edward Ayers.
Developed in the 1990s with the support of an NEH grant, The Valley of the Shadow is a web-based portal to the history of two communities—one Northern, one Southern—between 1859 and 1867. Through maps, images, church records, newspapers, letters, diaries, and census and tax records, the digital archive provides visitors the opportunity to explore the lives of ordinary men and women during the Civil War and the early Reconstruction era. In the two decades since its creation, the website has been used in middle school, high school, and college classrooms, as well as by scholars. It served as an early model for what digital history might look like, and its creation has had an extraordinary impact on the career of its creator, Edward Ayers, as well as on digital humanities more broadly.
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In the Presence of Mine Enemies, the first book to come out of The Valley of the Shadow, was awarded the Bancroft Prize. Image courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.
The Thin Line of Freedom, the second book to come out of The Valley of the Shadow project, was awarded the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Image courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.
NEH funding helped Ayers put The Valley of the Shadow online—a real innovation at the time. The resource had originally been created for CD-ROM, but hosting it on the internet meant that it could, and still does, serve as a free resource to students and teachers throughout the world. The site won the 2005 Classics Award from MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association, and the first eLincoln Prize from Gettysburg College.
Project Timeline (scroll for more)
1985
Ayers awarded an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers.
1993
The Valley of the Shadow begins to be developed as a digital resource. It is one of the founding projects of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia.
1996
The NEH awards funding to The Valley of the Shadow, enabling project directors to bring The Valley of the Shadow online.
1999
Ayers awarded NEH funding to develop a digital archive on an African American community in Charlottesville, Virginia.
2001
Ayers becomes the Buckner W. Clay Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.
The Valley of the Shadow wins the first eLincoln Prize, awarded by Gettysburg College.
2004
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1864 is published by W. W. Norton & Company.
Ayers is awarded the Bancroft Prize for In the Presence of Mine Enemies.
2005
The Valley of the Shadow wins the 2005 Classics Award from MERLOT.
2007
Ayers becomes President of the University of Richmond.
The University of Virginia Library begins to archive The Valley of the Shadow, maintaining it as part of its permanent digital collection.
2010
Ayers awarded funding to develop Visualizing Emancipation.
2017
The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America is published by W.W. Norton & Company.
2018
Ayers is awarded the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for The Thin Light of Freedom.
For Ayers, developing The Valley of the Shadow fundamentally altered his career. In addition to publishing the site and an accompanying book of resources, Ayers wrote two award-winning books as part of the project. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (2003), which won the Bancroft Prize, and The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (2017), which won the Lincoln Prize. Ayers’ experience developing the project helped him as he went on to found a number of digital humanities initiatives. At the University of Virginia, as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Ayers established the Virginia Center for Digital History. And at the University of Richmond, where he served as president, Ayers established the Digital Scholarship Lab, which produced Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America and Visualizing Emancipation, which was established in part through another NEH grant. Now, Ayers serves on the board of Virginia Humanities and is Chairman of the Board of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond. He is also the founding co-host of <em>BackStory</em>, a humanities podcast that reaches more than 500,000 people each month. With NEH funding, episodes of BackStory are being produced specifically for classroom use.
