Baltimore, Md. – The first-ever e-Lincoln Prize for Civil War research went to the Valley of the Shadow project, for its outstanding combination of CD-ROM, text, and online media. UMBC assistant professor of history Anne Rubin managed the Valley project while a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and continues to work on the project as a consultant.

Hailed as “a model for digital history” by the e-Lincoln judges, Valley of the Shadow allows visitors to explore microcosms of antebellum life in two contrasting valley communities -- one Northern (Franklin County, Pennsylvania), one Southern (Augusta County, Virginia). The project allows access to a trove of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, military records, census data, business records, maps, images, music and other sources gathered in ten years of research. The result, which includes the records of 15,000 soldiers and 5,000 slaves, allows visitors to "reconstruct the moral logic of motives and examine how that logic bent and buckled under [the] stress" of secession and war.

Created in 1989, the Lincoln Prize honors the finest scholarly works in the English language on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or a related subject. The e-Lincoln jury was comprised of: Janice L. Reiff (chair) of UCLA; David Herbert Donald of Harvard University (emeritus); and Drew Gilpin Faust of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. The Lincoln Prize jury was comprised of: Douglas L. Wilson (chair) of Knox College; Carol Reardon of the Pennsylvania State University; and Nina Silber of Boston University. Professors Donald and Wilson are past winners of the Lincoln Prize.

As Valley project manager from 1994 – 1996, Rubin researched the history of the valley, wrote the narratives and web pages, and supervised the research team. Her book on Confederate nationalism (1863 – 1868) is soon to be published by University of North Carolina Press.