e Cold War. Michael Reese of the Department of History at the University of Washington has created an excellent set of curriculum materials on The Cold War and the Red Scare in Washington State. Designed for high school history and social studies classes, the heart of the site is comprised of some 50 documents relating to the 1948 investigation of "un-American" activities by the Canwell Committee (the state's "little HUAC") and to the University of Washington's 1949 decision to fire three allegedly pro-communist professors. Other fairly typical examples of class Web sites include Richard Immerman's History of U.S. Foreign Policy After the First World War (Temple), Lisa Daley's American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Syracuse) and Patricia Stein Wrightson's government class on Cold War Dynamics (Georgetown). The recent advent of course templates produced by firms such as Blackboard, Inc and WebCt, which make placing materials online much easier, has accelerated the rush of faculty to the Web. Unfortunately, most of these courses are accessible only to students enrolled in the classes. Thus, institutional and faculty concerns over markets and rights to intellectual property have begun to erode the Web's once radical principle of openness. For my own classes in recent U.S. history at American University, I have created a "dynamic syllabus" that includes links to lecture outlines, bibliographies, campus resources, and information on the Web (see, for example, History 207: The United States since 1945), used Lotus Notes to set up a series of small discussion groups (see Using Lotus Notes), and assigned group projects that require students to research and create their own Web sites (see The Projects). For details, including the principles underlying the course design, see Notes of a Recovering Administrator, an informal talk I gave to a group of faculty colleagues at American University on February 5, 2,000. I cannot report that the results have always been successful. Some groups bonded well, worked hard and surmounted difficulties with both content and technology. Others did not. Judging from student evaluations, the experience was positive for most students and spectacular for some. For an example of one of the better student Web projects, click on The Space Race. See also the evaluation of the project by its student Webmeister, Team Three (Space Race) Evaluation. Summary and Conclusion What are we to make of all of this? To be sure, what is available on the Web is but a fraction of what constitutes the body of evidence and scholarship on the Cold War. For Cold War scholars, as for scholars in general, the Web is not likely to replace libraries and archives soon, if ever. Technology is no substitute for mastery of content or commitment to good teaching; nor will it turn uncommitted students into good learners. Indeed, the Web may encourage poor intellectual habits: the failure to exercise critical judgment in evaluating Web based sources for one; or plagiarism -- all too easy given the point and click character of the Web-- for another. The Web can also be a chaotic and confusing place: at times seemingly ephemeral, as sites wink in and out of existence, sometimes difficult to navigate, and filled with trivia and worse. Many of the sites noted above are heavily freighted with special pleading for some of the major institutional actors in the Cold War; and not a few are suffused with the triumphalism that characterizes our current, post Cold War moment. Historians and their students will have to work especially hard to sustain the critical approach that such materials require. Moreover, as traditionalists will immediately recognize (and deplore), the boundaries that once separated students from scholars and amateurs from professionals have eroded, as have many of the traditional markers of intellectual quality and integrity. In such an environment, historians will find it increasingly difficult to create and sustain authoritative narratives, as they once at least imagined they could do within the seemingly self-contained wo