The Philosophy of Rhetoric
The thesis of the Valley project is not obvious at first, but if one spends substantial amounts of time exploring the archive, a particular pedagogical philosophy begins to emerge. By placing archives from two counties on opposing sides of the war electronically side by side, the site creates a kind of metahistory (in microcosm) of the civil war, presenting information from both sides of the divide. Structurally, both sides are on equal footing. In almost every topic, one can choose information from either Augusta County or Franklin County. In this way, the two counties themselves become organizing metaphors, with binary elements of union and confederacy. (For example, notice the choices given in the Letters & Diaries room; or in the Newspaper Room) Built in to the rhetoric itself is a philosophy based on neutrality, or, put another way, the philosophy of the strong defense of rhetoric.