While fully and freely admitting that my knowledge of the field is not much greater than George M. Cohan’s, I will say that a great many CD-ROMs look pretty feeble to me. They are so widely promoted as the path to the future that every enterprise seems to be straining to cast its information beneath that gleaming surface, and often enough the result is: a stupid and complicated way to consult an encyclopedia; a stupid and complicated way to look up batting averages; a stupid and complicated way to plan a vacation.

I did not say any of this during meetings over the past months with the people at Byron Preiss Multimedia, who were assembling a CD-ROM that would bear our name, American Heritage: The Civil War—The Complete Multimedia Experience, but my heart was honeycombed with doubt. Then, last week, I saw the result of our long collaboration, and I was both impressed and chastened.

I think it’s very good. I’ve become jaded hearing the currently universal mantra of interactive, but this particular CD-ROM seems to me interactive in a genuinely imaginative and useful way.

It is built on the foundation of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, our great bestseller that has been in print steadily since 1960. Bruce Catton wrote the text, and that text is available on the disk—as is the entirety of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Red Badge of Courage, and other indispensable works. Certainly, the likelihood of someone calling up Harriet Beecher Stowe on the screen and then tucking in to her world-changing story is, to say the least, remote. But there’s a peculiar feeling of something akin to security in knowing it’s there. Once you’ve become tired of reading print on the screen (which has never taken me more than three minutes), you can call up songs of the North and South, hear them sung while you look at the sheet music and learn a bit about the circumstances under which they were written, then move to photographs- hundreds and hundreds of them—and then paintings, then listen to another song, then go into battle.

And here the CD-ROM offered me up another surprise. I have trouble with re-enactors. I know that many, even most, of them are scrupulously faithful historians, getting it right all the way down to the merest button and percussion cap, but seeing those inescapably modern faces over gray and blue uniforms going forward into sunny Antietams where everything’s just the way it was except nobody gets hurt—it makes me queasy. Yet as they are deployed here in a solid hour’s worth of video, the re-enactors serve to clarify and instruct. You can click on a piece of equipment and see not only a splendid museum-piece example of it, but a soldier swinging it over his shoulder or loading it or tying it to a horse, and the function of the item in question becomes vivid and