Students and others who lack a fairly deep knowledge of the subject are best advised to go elsewhere for reliable and properly-presented information on the Civil War, and teachers and others who already know something about the war and the wealth of material potentially available on such a website will be frustrated and disappointed by what they find. This conflict has been subject to countless books, journals, magazines and articles, among other venues, and continues to be an event that piques interest on an encompassing whole. A website such as this presents the opportunity for someone of even marginal interest to gain valuable insight and perhaps inspiration to learn a little more. With the bare minimum of starting materials or just with general queries, one can conduct a designated search to achieve the desired outcome. The major drawback of this site is that much is yet to be developed.
Subsections are incomplete, especially regarding their data pools.
But this should not detract from the sources that are currently available. By Andrew Dawson Crisis at Fort Sumter is an interactive simulation Web site reconstructing the political dilemma faced by Abraham Lincoln in the period between the withdrawal of the Deep South from the Union, following the election of 1860, and the outbreak of war in April 1861. Its author, professor Richard B. Latner of Tulane University has created a site of the highest quality aimed at the college level and those keen to explore the complexity of the presidential decision making process. Thus, while teachers are encouraged to incorporate primary sources in their teaching, every teacher in the country is offered basically the same principal source and suggestions for using it. Most sites on the web are lavish, needing search engines to find anything.