Private Passions, Public Legacy: Paul Mellon's Personal Library

University of Virginia Library

This exhibit presents 60 items from Paul Mellon's private collection of material relating to the history of Virginia. The entire collection, 447 items, is housed at the University of Virginia. A 600-word essay provides biographical information on Mellon and his bequest. The exhibit is arranged in six sections, from "Exploring the New World" through "Slavery and the Civil War" to "Opening New Vistas". "Acquiring Virginia's Legacy" presents six highlights of the collection and a 1,400-word essay explaining its significance. A 150-word explanatory essay accompanies each image. The exhibit includes facsimiles of 11 books, seven prints, seven letters, five objects of ephemera, and five maps. Among the ephemera is a myriopticon, a rolled painting that viewers can "unroll" to view scenes from the Civil War. The site is primarily interesting as an exhibit and may not be particularly useful for researchers except as an introduction to the Mellon collection.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, VIDEO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Slave Movement During the 18th and 19th Centuries

Data and Program Library Service, University of Wisconsin Madison

This site offers downloadable raw data and documentation on 11 topics related to the 18th- and 19th-century slave trade, including records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas 1817-1843, the 18th-century Virginia slave trade, and slave trade to Jamaica 1782-1788 and 1805-1808. Data sets contain information such as port of departure, vessel and owner information, number of slaves carried, origins of slaves, and ports of arrival. Each data set includes a 250-word description explaining bibliographic information, file inventory, and methodology, as well as a codebook that guides users in reading the data. The data is provided without analysis, and the site carries a warning that data analysis is tedious, time-consuming work that requires specialized data sorting software. The site would be particularly useful in controlled assignments for college-level survey or advanced high school students' research into slavery and the slave trade. See "History Matters" entry Data and Program Library Service: Online Data Archive for information on other social science studies available at this site.

Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

American Civil War Resources

Special Collections, Digital Library and Archives, Virginia Tech

This site contains more than 10,000 documents and monographs from the Civil War era, including roughly 6,000 monographs from the Elden E. Josh Billings Collection. The site also contains transcriptions of Union and Confederate soldiers' letters and diaries, homefront letters, memoirs, and contemporary research files drawn from 19 collections. Each document group is accompanied by a 300-word biography of the principal author(s), a 150-word description of the scope and content of the collection, a 75-word account of the provenance, and a list of the collection's contents organized chronologically, with a roughly 15-word description of each item. The site also includes links to nine online Virginia Tech theses and dissertations on Civil War topics as well as a guide to other Special Collections Civil War sources. This site is ideal for researching the lives of Civil War soldiers and the homefront during the Civil War.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-09.

Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925

American Memory, Library of Congress

This site offers published books selected from the Library of Congress' general and rare book collections in an "attempt to capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century." Contains 139 books, a few by well-known figures, such as Edwin Booth, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson, but most by little-known residents and visitors to the region. Includes memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, books of letters, journals, poems, addresses, reports, speeches, travel books, sermons, books of photographs, and promotional brochures. In addition to Washington, D.C., the cities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia, are featured. A special presentation entitled "Pictures of People and Places from the Collection" consists of selected illustrations organized in three sections of 10 images each on Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. The site includes 10 works dealing with slavery--a number of which were written by former slaves--and approximately 10 works dealing with encounters between whites and Native Americans. Includes links to 22 related sites. A valuable collection for those studying ways that Washington, D.C., and neighboring regions have been described in print over several centuries.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Virginia Historical Inventory (VHI)

The Library of Virginia

Furnishes more than 19,000 survey reports, more than 6,200 photographs, and 103 annotated county and city maps that document the history of thousands of structures built in Virginia prior to the Civil War. Original research was gathered in the late 1930s by the Virginia Writers' Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and includes information compiled by field workers through onsite investigations--including interviews with residents--and by using court records and other local resources. Provides descriptions of architectural details, histories of buildings, lists of owners, and in many cases photographs and sketches. The project was "specifically charged with describing the vernacular architecture and history of everyday buildings built before 1860: homes, workplaces, churches, public buildings.” Also includes materials on cemeteries, tombstones, antiques, historical events, personages, land grants, wills, deeds, diaries, and correspondence. Provides a 5,600-word essay on the project's history. Users may search reports, maps, and photographs by keywords; includes specific instructions for genealogical research and for finding documents dealing with the Civil War and African American history. Site creators note that many of the structures documented by the project "no longer exist, and the VHI photographs may be the only extant visual records of them." A valuable resource for those studying the material culture of Virginia's past.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Geography of Slavery in America

Virginia Center for Digital History and Thomas Costa, University of Virginia College at Wise

Provides full transcriptions and images of more than 4,000 newspaper advertisements regarding runaway slaves, mostly from the Williamsburg Virginia Gazette, between 1736 and 1803. Includes ads placed by owners and overseers for runaways as well as ads for captured runaway or suspected runaway slaves placed by sheriffs and other governmental officials. In addition, the site's creators have included ads for runaway servants and sailors as well as military deserters, to offer "a unique look at the lower orders in 18th-century Virginia." Searchable by any words appearing in ads. Users can click on the name of a slave within an ad to find links to all other ads listing that name. The site also provides approximately 40 links to related primary material--including letters, laws, court documents, planters' records, and literature. Additional material includes 10 photographs of a recreated slave dwelling, information on currency and clothing of the time, a gazetteer with seven maps of the region, a 13-title bibliography, and three K-12 teaching guides using the ads. At present, this site includes 40 ads from a Norfolk newspaper; plans are set to digitize additional ads that appeared through 1790 from five more Virginia and two Maryland newspapers. A component of the Virtual Jamestown site (see "History Matters" entry for more information on the larger site). A valuable source for those studying slave culture, Virginia society in the eighteenth century, and the use of print culture to support the institution of slavery.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-08.

Diary, Correspondence, and Papers of Robert "King" Carter of Virginia, 1701-1732

Edmund Berkeley, Jr., University of Virginia

A work-in-progress collection of letters and diary entries of Robert "King" Carter (1663-1732), a landowner and public figure called by the site's creator "the richest and most important man of his day in Virginia." Educated in England, Carter inherited and acquired more than 300,000 acres in the Northern Neck Proprietary, a section of land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers. Carter, who owned nearly 1,000 slaves, served as a member of the Council of Virginia and as acting governor of the Colony. The site presently contains "transcripts of all the extant Robert Carter texts," which includes approximately 800 letters, written between 1701 and 1727, diary entries covering 1722-1726, and wills and codicils. Each letter and diary appears in texts providing both modern and original spellings. Entries contain summary statements and have links to notes that offer identifying information for more than 130 persons, places, and things. Offers a 2,200-word biography, a 2,100-word essay on the Northern Neck Proprietary, and a bibliography of 70 titles. The site's editor and transcriber, a former curator of manuscripts and director of special collections at the University of Virginia, wrote his master's thesis on Carter. Of value to those studying 18th-century aristocratic, political, and economic life in Virginia.

Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 2007-11-19.

Lift Every Voice: Music in American Life

Mary Prendergast, Assistant Music Librarian, University of Virginia Library

An exhibit of music and documents that "commemorates and celebrates a variety of songs that were a part of everyday American life through the centuries." Includes 18 audio excerpts lasting approximately one minute each of representative ballads, hymns and spirituals, patriotic odes, minstrel tunes, songs from musicals, protest songs, and songs about the state of Virginia. Clips include performances by Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Lead Belly, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Accompanied by a 10,500-word essay arranged by types of music and interspersed with more than 100 historical documents, including manuscripts, illustrations, photographs, hymn books, songsters, portraits, posters, sheet music covers, album covers, and record labels. A "Virginiana" section provides material from Thomas Jefferson's library to illustrate his interest in music. The site is a good introduction for those interested in understanding historical roles, functions, and uses of music by various American groups.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.
Website last visited on 2008-10-08.

Valley of the Shadow Online Lessons

The Valley of the Shadow, a site rich with documentary evidence about two counties during the Civil War, provides these thorough and well-organized lessons for students in grades 7-12 in which students contend directly with various kinds of primary documents. Lessons include using census data to explore antebellum occupations; using newspapers to study debates over slavery and secession, the impact of railroads, and the experience of German and Irish immigrants; using a variety of sources to put the Gettysburg Address in context; and analyzing slaveowners' wills to answer the question "What happened to slaves when their owners died?" The site also provides paper topics (both traditional essays and creative writing), with guided suggestions for using the extensive Valley collections to find material on each topic.

Resources Available: TEXT.
Website last visited on 0000-00-00.

US Presidential Election Maps: 1860-1996

Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, University of Virginia Library

Provides maps color-coded according to presidential candidate displaying percent of popular vote the winning candidate in each state received in elections between 1860 and 1996. Currently includes maps showing electoral vote distributions by state for elections between 1900 and 1996; the site plans to include maps on electoral votes going back to the 1860 election. Also contains a chart with the number and percentage of votes each candidate received in each state in the 2000 election. Maps of Virginia show cities and counties won by George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 election, and the percentage of votes that Bush, Gore, Ralph Nader, and all third-party candidates received in each county. Number of votes cast in Virginia elections between 1984 and 1996 for state house, state senate, attorney general, lieutenant governor, governor, U.S. Congress, U. S. Senate, and president is offered at county and precinct levels. Six links are provided to sites with data on the 2000 presidential election. A valuable site for those interested in shifts in the geographic distribution of votes for president since the Civil War, and for those studying recent statewide elections in Virginia.

Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.
Website last visited on 2008-10-09.