Beyond The Stone Wall

I first visited this site several years ago, and was impressed enough by it to feature it as a Family First Site. Not only the subject matter intiguing, but also the way it was presented. It's rather unique way of conducting an online tour is one that hopefully will become more commonplace in the future. The site has grown in the past year, and now is a great time to revisit it.

It is called Behind the Stone Wall, and is a guided tour of the several Civil War battlefields. All the sites are national parks, and present their moment in history quite well. But not everyone can be physically visit these sites. So through the magic of the multimedia Internet technology, you can take a unique cybervisit. What makes it so unique is that instead of static photographs, there are collections of 360 degree panoramas of the major scenes of the battlefields. The images load automatically and then start rotating. You can stop them and manually move them, allowing a closer inspection of a particular area. This helps give a 3-dimensional feeling to the pictures, increasing awareness to what the battlefield was and really is like. There are also previews of works in progress, such as the Shiloh battlefield, and the Andersonville prison.

Having visited a few of these sites, I can say that this site captures the feeling and essence of the spirit that is our nation's history. It is very moving to go to the scene where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address, where John Brown made his infamous raid, and where Jackson stood like a stone wall, and see what the physical locations are really like.

http://www.JATRUCK.COM/stonewall/

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