Digital Collections

The Valley of the Shadow

The Valley of the Shadow

The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown's raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells the forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War.

Virtual Jamestown

Virtual Jamestown

The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment." As a work in progress, Virtual Jamestown aims to shape the national dialogue on the occasion of the four hundred-year anniversary observance in 2007 of the founding of the Jamestown colony.

Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970

Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970

Television News of the Civil Rights Era aims to collect, digitize, and present in streaming video format over the World Wide Web television news footage from the period and to make these valuable materials available to scholars, teachers, and students. The current archive contains films from the nightly news from two local television stations in Virginia--WDBJ (CBS) Roanoke and WSLS (NBC) Roanoke. In this initial installment we have digitized over 230 films. This rare footage includes full speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, the governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as original footage of school desegregation, public meetings, local debates over civil rights matters, and interviews with citizens.

The Virginia Emigrants to Liberia Project

The Virginia Emigrants to Liberia Project

The Virginia Emigrants to Liberia Project includes a searchable database of nearly 3700 Virginia emigrants to Liberia and nearly 250 Virginia emancipators, a timeline of relevant events and documents between 1787 and 1866, a compilation of important related sources, links to related research websites and news of Liberia today.

The Danville Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975 (photo: The Danville Register & Bee)

The Danville Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975

The Danville Civil Rights Movement examines the responses of ten Danville residents to the long civil rights struggle that occurred in their hometown. Text by Emma C. Edmunds is accompanied by the work of Charlottesville photographer, Tom Cogill, who took portraits of individuals who shared their stories.

The Countryside Transformed: The Eastern Shore of Virginia and the Railroad

The Countryside Transformed: The Eastern Shore of Virginia and the Railroad

The Countryside Transformed is a collaborative effort of the Eastern Shore Public Library and the Virginia Center for Digital History of the University of Virginia. The project has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Fair Play Foundation. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy provided discretionary funds for developing a bibliography of maps.

Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South

Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South

Race and Place is an archive about the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century. The focus of the collection is the town of Charlottesville in Virginia. The Jim Crow laws segregated African-Americans from white Americans in public places such as schools, and school buses. The archive contains photos, letters, two regional censuses and a flash map of the town of Charlottesville. The Jim Crow laws were not overturned until the important Brown versus Board of Education court ruling in 1954 (but not totally eliminated until the Civil Rights Act of the 1964).

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia

The Geography of Slavery is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War.

The Dolley Madison Project

The Dolley Madison Project

The Dolley Madison Project provides a window onto the domestic, political, and social worlds of Dolley Madison and on the development of elite Washington, D.C. society in the early national period.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

The Ground Beneath Our Feet

The Ground Beneath Our Feet is a documentary film series and website about Virginia's history after the Civil War.