The Virginia Center for Digital History at The University of Virginia

VCDH News… for the latest press releases and information on VCDH projects…

VCDH to Partner with Area Schools on $1 Million Teaching American History Grant,
"America on the World Stage: A Global Perspective to U.S. History"

July 2009 -- Charlottesville City, Albemarle County, Greene County, Madison County, and Orange County Public Schools, in partnership with the Virginia Center for Digital History, have been awarded a Teaching American History grant by the U.S. Department of Education to provide professional development training for American and world history educators. Titled America on the World Stage, the goal of this project is to recognize the urgent practical and conceptual need for teachers to understand the emergence of the United States' power and prestige in relation to world events. The first three years of a five year proposal were approved for approximately $1M, and the final two years will be supported contingent upon Congressional support of the program in 2012.

Each year, teachers will engage in a series of lectures framed by America on the World Stage: A Global Perspective to U.S. History (Organization of American Historians, 2008). Small cohorts of teacher leaders will connect these content sessions with practical guidance on bringing this international approach to the classroom, with suggested lesson plans and activities. These products will be submitted for a juried publication review, then shared with colleagues online. Finally, teachers will participate in extended summer field courses with Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Partners and supporters of grant include following historians and scholars from 32 major universities and colleges; the Curry School of Education at U.Va.; the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC; non-profit and community organizations (American Civil War Museum at Historic Tredegar, Antietam National Battlefield, National Park Service, Ashlawn-Highland, Home of President James Monroe, Fort McHenry National Park, Fredericksburg National Battlefield, National Park Service, Harper's Ferry National Historical Park, National Park Service, George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens); libraries and museums (Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, Inc., Baltimore Museum of Industry, British National Archives, Historic Jamestowne, Jefferson Library, Monticello, Library of Virginia, National Archives and Records Administration, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); and professional organizations (American Historical Association, Gilder Lehrman Institute, Organization of American Historians).

2009 Virginia Forum Spotlights VCDH Projects, Scholarship, Outreach

Six representatives of VCDH projects featuring scholarship, teaching, and outreach participated in the 2009 Virginia Forum, held at Longwood College on April 24-25. Devoted to all aspects and time periods of Virginia history, the Virginia Forum brings together historians, teachers, writers, archivists, museum curators, historic site interpreters, librarians, and others engaged in the study and interpretation of Virginia history to share their knowledge, research, and experiences.

Thomas Costa, Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia's College at Wise and director of The Geography of Slavery project, presented a paper titled, "Tracking Down Runaways: Building Biographies of Bound Laborers in Virginia, 1736-1815." Costa's work will be featured on an upcoming Virginia Public Radio program, With Good Reason; check the WGR website for listings.

VCDH Director of Education and Outreach Andy Mink chaired a session entitled, Lessons from the Teaching American History Grants. This panel discussion featured Fellowship programs in two VCDH-led Teaching American History projects. Each model featured best practice examples of scholar-informed, teacher-created scholarship and classroom resources. Dr. Marian Mollin, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of History at Virginia Tech, shared her work as the lead instructor of the History Scholars Program in the "Perspectives, Legacy, and Identity" Teaching American History grant that serves four Roanoke-area school divisions. This cadre of teachers explored the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in state and local history by conducting original research based on Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970 archive. Chris Bunin, Director of the Teaching Fellows Program in "The Virginia Experiment" Teaching American History grant, highlighted VCDH's work to integrate geospatial technology into classroom teaching. Serving five school divisions in central Virginia, this cadre of teachers created GIS modules to help teachers and students map episodes of history, understand the relationship between time and space, and visualize change over time in a dynamic fashion.

For the session on Digital Archives and the Power of the Internet, Lynn Rainville, a visiting research professor at VCDH and director of the African American Cemeteries in Albemarle and Amherst Counties project, delivered a presentation entitled "Virtual Places: Digitizing Local History."

Independent scholar Deborah Lee, who co-directs (with Marie Tyler-McGraw) the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia project, chaired a panel on Freedom and Slavery in Virginia. Lee recently received an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society to conduct research for book-length manuscript on the Custis family's role in the African colonization movement in Virginia; as part of that fellowship, she will prepare a new essay for the Virginia Emigrants website.

Finally, a session on Living in Virginia After the Civil War featured a presentation by VCDH Director/Associate Professor Scot French on "African American Property Ownership and Post-Emancipation Politics in Albemarle County, Virginia." The talk showcased French's research for a new book/visualization project that expands on materials presented in Race and Place: An African American Community.

In other VCDH news, Crandall Shifflett, Professor of History at Virginia Tech and director of the Virtual Jamestown project, has been named the 2009 Eccles Center Visiting Professor in North American Studies at the British Library The Eccles Fellowship is awarded by the British Association for American Studies and goes to one North American scholar annually. The fellowship supports twelve weeks of study in the Eccles Center for American Studies. During the fellowship, Shifflett will be in residence at the British Library and also doing lectures and research at King's College London digital humanities center, one of the leading digital centers in the world, and at other archives and museums in London. His research on English-Indian encounters is for a book manuscript tentatively entitled "'The Death of My People Thrice': Envisioning Colonization."

Virginia Center for Digital History Launches
Virginia Emigrants To Liberia Website

October 1, 2008: Virginia Emigrants to Liberia, a new website directed by scholars affiliated with the Virginia Center for Digital History, opens a window into the lives of free black and enslaved Virginians, the trans-Atlantic world they inhabited, and the African nation they helped to found.

Between 1820 and 1865, some 3,700 African Americans left Virginia for Liberia, the West African settlement founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS). About one-quarter of these emigrants were free blacks, the rest newly manumitted slaves, most freed upon the condition of their voluntary resettlement in the ACS-governed colony (1820-1847) and independent black republic (1847-present) across the Atlantic. More than two hundred white Virginians emancipated slaves for emigration.

Through the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia website, researchers can gather census-like information on individual emigrants from a searchable database, read stories about emigrants and emancipators, and easily access related online resources. The database enables historians and genealogists to collect and analyze data not usually available for enslaved people, such as surnames and family relationships, and connect people to localities on both continents.

The website features a variety of resources, the heart of which is a searchable database of emigrants and emancipators. The Emigrants table is searchable by first and last name, place of origin in Virginia, ship, emancipator, and destination in Liberia. It provides detailed shipboard census information often including full names, family relationships, occupation and literacy; data from the 1843 Liberian census; and additional information from ACS and First African Baptist Church (Richmond) records. The Emancipator table is searchable by surname, county, and year of emancipation.

Other resources on the website include ten stories of emigrants and emancipators, representing a range of experiences. For example, emigrant Hilary Teage wrote the Liberian Declaration of Independence in 1847 and Joseph Jenkins Roberts became the world's first African American president. Harriet Graves Waring became a reluctant founding mother, and Augustus Curtis participated in the slave trade (Roberts avowed Curtis was the only African American who did so) and lived among the Vai people. Patrick Bullock and his family felt abandoned as they endured illness and starvation.

Broadly collaborative in design, the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia project builds on the painstaking research of two leading historians of Virginia colonization: Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw, author of the book An African Republic: Black And White Virginians In The Making Of Liberia (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and Dr. Deborah A. Lee, who has researched and written on women colonizationists, the Underground Railroad, and antislavery in the mid-Atlantic region. It features as well an illustrated essay by Harvard University doctoral candidate Dalila Scruggs. Scruggs analyzed images produced by black settlers and white colonizationists to better understand underlying cultural beliefs and how they were used to promote the colonization movement in the antebellum United States.

The web development phase of the project was funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the database developed in partnership with the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County.

VCDH director Scot French hailed the project as a major step toward expanding public awareness of the Virginia colonization movement's social, cultural, and geopolitical dimensions, as well as a research and teaching tool with great potential for development and expansion.

"I'm thrilled that Deborah Lee and Marie Tyler-McGraw chose to work with VCDH on this project. These two scholars, working in traditional archives, conducted research of enormous significance to the study of slavery, freedom, race, and nationality on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, through this unique website, they have made their findings widely accessible to the public as searchable data, narrated stories, and scholarly essays."

Now in its tenth year, VCDH is committed to advancing knowledge through the application of digital technologies to history and related fields of scholarly inquiry; designing and developing innovative applications of technology in consultation with historians and other project partners; and facilitating exchanges among educators with a shared commitment to transforming how history is taught, learned and accessed in the Digital Age.

New Civil Rights Digital Library Features VCDH's Television News Collection

The recently developed Civil Rights Digital Library features online video archives from Georgia as well as VCDH's Television News of the Civil Rights Era, 1950-1970, expanding access to these historical collections through a major new hub.

The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) is the newest initiative of the Digital Library of Georgia and is the most ambitious and comprehensive digital archive of the national Civil Rights Movement to date. At the forefront of the digital library is an online video archive featuring more than 30 hours of unedited historical news film chronicling the civil rights struggle in several southern cities.

Held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries, more than 450 raw news clips from WSB television in Atlanta and WALB-TV in Albany, Ga., cover a broad range of key civil rights events as well as local and national figures. These include unaired and unedited footage of the Atlanta sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, Martin Luther King Jr.'s reaction to President Kennedy's assassination, his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and his funeral.

Likewise, VCDH's 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.

"We anticipate that the Civil Rights Digital Library will continue to grow through our partnerships with allied organizations across the U.S. like the Virginia Center for Digital History," said Toby Graham, director of the Digital Library of Georgia, based at the University of Georgia. "Together with other colleges and universities, libraries and contributing institutions, users are able to access rare and priceless pieces of American history at the click of a mouse."

In addition to VCDH's Television News of the Civil Rights Era, the CRDL aggregates original content from more than 90 other libraries, public archives and museums from across the nation, including oral histories, letters, diaries, FBI files and photographs.

The easy-to-navigate site can be searched by key events, topics, educator resources, media type and places, using an interactive map powered by Google. From sound recordings to texts and photographs to editorial cartoons, CRDL's rich video and multi-media content appeal to a broad audience — academics, special interest groups and even journalists looking to support their online stories.

"This is truly a civil rights portal, providing a seamless virtual library on the Movement," said Dr. Barbara McCaskill, an English professor at the University of Georgia, whose interest and work helped inspire the Civil Rights Digital Library. "Through the Library, we can nearly eyewitness the pivotal events that shaped American life today."

The Civil Rights Digital Library receives financial support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services and is an initiative of GALILEO, the statewide online library.

In cooperation with the CRDL, University of Georgia faculty, undergraduates and graduate students are creating a special site for teachers, "Freedom on Film," with instructional materials to aid in facilitating the use of the CRDL's video content in the learning process. To be released in August 2008, the "Freedom on Film" project features more than 70 civil rights stories from nine cities in Georgia complemented by related news film, discussion questions, lesson plans and suggested readings.

"The civil rights events of the 1950s and 1960s are a crucial part of American history, and we are working to create a comprehensive resource for teachers to educate and engage students," said McCaskill, who is developing the section along with Derrick Alridge, director of UGA's Institute for African American Studies.

Visit the Civil Rights Digital Library at www.civilrightslibrary.org. The "Freedom on Film" project can be viewed at www.civilrights.uga.edu.

NEH Awards Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to VCDH for Development of "Jefferson's Travels HistoryBrowser"

The National Endowment for the Humanities has selected VCDH for a major digital humanities grant award under its We the People program, which "encourages and strengthens the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture."

This month, NEH announced that VCDH will receive a $49,827 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for "Jefferson's Travels: A Digital Journey Using the HistoryBrowser." The award will fund development of an interactive web-based tool to integrate primary documents, dynamic maps, and related information in the study of history, with a particular focus on the life and times of Thomas Jefferson. A demonstration, sample projects, and more information about the tool (including "An Historian's View of the HistoryBrowser") can be found at the following address: http://jeffersonstravels.org/.

Under the 2008-09 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, VCDH Project Directors Scot French and Bill Ferster will partner with Monticello Webmaster Chad Wollerton and archivists, librarians, and content experts at Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies to develop a HistoryBrowser centered on Jefferson's Travels. Students in a Fall 2008 digital history seminar, to be co-taught by French and Ferster, will produce themed exhibits and visualizations with the scholarly guidance and technical support of the instructors and project partners. A previous version of the course, focused on Jefferson's 1786 travels to England, can be found at the following address: /courses/fall07/hius401-f/.

An Associate Professor of History and Director of VCDH, Scot French will be responsible for historical aspects of the project. His published works include analyses of Jefferson's writings on race and slavery (The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory, Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and Jefferson's relevance to later generations ("The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993," co-authored with Edward L. Ayers, in Jeffersonian Legacies, University of Virginia Press, 1994).

A Senior Scientist and Director of Technology for VCDH, Bill Ferster will oversee the technical aspects primarily involving the HistoryBrowser Flash application and database. He has been creating award-winning technology for over 30 years, founded three successful high-technology companies, won an EMMY award for Technical Achievement, and has developed PrimaryAccess (www.primaryaccess.org), a technically sophisticated Flash-based and database-driven tool for K-12 students to create digital documentaries.

Now in its 10th year, VCDH is committed to advancing knowledge through the application of digital technologies to history and related fields of scholarly inquiry; designing and developing innovative applications of technology in consultation with historians and other project partners, and facilitating exchanges among educators with a shared commitment to transforming how history is taught, learned and accessed in the Digital Age.

VCDH Launches Media Resource Site for Civil Rights Documentary

The Virginia Center for Digital History has launched a media resource site for Rising Up: Virginia's Civil Rights Movement, a U.Va. student-made documentary film airing this month on PBS stations in Virginia and across the nation.

The film broadly covers the South, but concentrates on Virginia and follows major events with close, personal stories, including: Samuel W. Tucker's 1939 library sit-in, Irene Morgan's 1946 busing case before the Supreme Court, the school desegregation crisis in 1958-59, the 1960 sit-ins, the violence of Danville, Va. and Birmingham, Ala. in 1963, and the resurgence of black voting and politics in 1965.

"Rising Up" was produced by William G. Thomas and Bill Reifenberger and their undergraduate students at the University of Virginia. Thomas, now the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska, began the project in 2005 as a faculty member at U.Va. when he started digitizing local television news footage from the 1950s. Much of this material has been thrown away by or lost by local stations, but WSLS and WDBJ in Roanoke had kept their extraordinary news films.

"We were very lucky to find these old films of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy," Thomas said, "but we were amazed to find the footage of the local people who made the civil rights movement happen."

Bill Reifenberger, a documentary filmmaker who has produced films on the Tuskegee Airmen and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, worked with the U.Va. students to interview many of the participants in these events. "What makes this documentary unique," he said, "is really that it is entirely student produced. We asked the young people in our class to tell the story of the civil rights struggle and we see here in 'Rising Up' what was important to them about that period."

Created from the perspectives of young people today, "Rising Up" was written, directed, narrated, filmed and edited by a talented group of undergraduate students at the University of Virginia. They take viewers through a series of compelling stories about how everyday Americans were moved to take a stand.

Mia Morgan, currently in her second year at the University of Virginia's School of Law, was an undergraduate at U.Va. and one of the twenty students in the class with Thomas and Reifenberger. Her uncle was the first African American student to desegregate the schools in Charlottesville, Virginia. "We had an opportunity to interview people who made difficult choices," Morgan said, "and we felt we needed to tell their story."

Rare footage from WDBJ and WSLS in Roanoke, Va., combine in "Rising Up" with remarkable interviews and footage from an NBC News debate between James J. Kilpatrick, Jr., a leading news editor in the South, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on whether the sit-ins were justified. This documentary also features a rarely seen speech from Rev. Dr. King on the violence at Danville in 1963.

The documentary film will be aired in Virginia on WHTJ Charlottesville, WCVE Richmond, WBRA Roanoke, WCVW Richmond beginning Thursday, Feb. 7. Check local listings. Nationally, the documentary has been picked up by Los Angeles affiliate KLCS, the fifth-most viewed PBS station in the nation, as well as other PBS stations.

The VCDH media resource site includes:

background information on Civil Rights veterans interviewed for the film;
a gallery of high-resolution images related to events featured in the documentary; and
historical footage from local television affiliates available through VCDH's Television News of the Civil Rights Era site.

VCDH Project Directors Publish Co-Authored Article in 'Southern Spaces' Online Journal

Virginia Center for Digital History project directors William G. Thomas III and Brooks Miles Barnes recently published a co-authored article, "The Countryside Transformed: The Eastern Shore of Virginia, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Creation of a Modern Landscape," in Emory University's online journal Southern Spaces. Their essay draws heavily on the VCDH website "The Countryside Transformed: The Railroad and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1870-1935."

Thomas and Barnes along with co-author Tom Szuba describe the profound impact on the Eastern Shore of the coming in 1884 of the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, an affiliate of the powerful Pennsylvania system. Long disconnected from the rapidly advancing rail network on the Atlantic Coast, the Eastern Shore seemed frozen in time. The arrival of the railroad altered the geography of the Eastern Shore in fundamental ways and prompted unforeseen changes in the peninsula's cultural and natural worlds. The essay examines what happened when one of the largest railroad companies in the nation came into a Southern community and connected it to the modern network of rails and commerce. As well as text, the essay features graphs and charts, photograph montages, and GIS-enhanced maps.

William G. Thomas III is John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. Brooks Miles Barnes (Ph.D., Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia) is Director of Information Services at the Eastern Shore Public Library.

VCDH's Texas Slavery Project Showcased at Nebraska Digital Workshop

The Texas Slavery Project (slated to be released in Spring 2008) was recently selected as one of three projects in digital scholarship to be showcased at the second annual Nebraska Digital Workshop, held in October 2007 at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska.

The competition, which highlights the most promising and exciting work in digital humanities by emerging scholars, drew more than twenty applications from as far away as Russia. Andrew Torget, the founder and director of the Texas Slavery Project, was selected as one of three finalists, awarded an honorarium, and invited to present the project to an invitation-only crowd at the CDRH. Torget is a Ph.D candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and a VCDH Graduate Fellow.

The Texas Slavery Project examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850. Centered on a database of slave and slaveholder populations, the project features a series of dynamic and interactive maps, a population search engine, and original documents from the era, all of which open new windows in the role of slavery in the development of the American Southwest.

For more information, see the Texas Slavery Project's web site: www.TexasSlaveryProject.org

VCDH Pays Respects to Roy Rosenzweig, 'Digital History' Pioneer

The staff and project directors of the Virginia Center for Digital History would like to express their condolences at the death of a major leader in the field of digital history, Roy Rosenzweig. He was the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and the founder of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He was a powerful and constant advocate for what has come to be called "digital history."

An accomplished historian of American cultural and social history, with many books and articles to his credit, Rosenzweig was a powerful teacher and scholar. But he wanted to do more than that, and through the World Wide Web he sought new ways not only to communicate history to students and the general public, but to find new means to preserve the stories of ordinary men and women. He believed in the importance of history "from the bottom up" and thought the World Wide Web could democratize the writing and teaching of history, incorporate the voices of the rich diversity of our population and heritage, and engage Americans and those interested in history around the world through the excitement he and his staff generated in their work at his Center. We at VCDH share his vision. A colleague and a visionary, he will be missed.

VFH & VCDH Collaborate With Southern Virginia Consortium To Secure $1 Million Teaching American History Grant

Twenty-four teachers will begin a three year historical journey as a result of a successful collaboration between the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH), Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, and four school divisions in Southern Virginia. This program is one of only five in Virginia and 122 nation-wide funded through the highly competitive Teaching American History initiative of the U.S. Department of Education, which received 288 applications this year.

"This great project brings together three of VFH's most important areas of interest -- local history, American History, and teachers -- and creates opportunities for local communities, museums, and libraries to become involved with teachers and schools. The VFH is quite pleased to be part of it," Dr. Robert Vaughan, VFH President, says.

"As a statewide humanities organization, we realized that we needed to be doing more in this area of Virginia which has faced economic decline and diminishing resources-a concept we call community building through the humanities. Our role in the project was to develop the content, organize the proposal, and provide leadership to the many groups and organizations involved. Our long record in teacher education and American History projects made the VFH a natural partner in this consortium," Vaughan continued.

Participants from all grade levels, called American Origins Teaching Fellows, were chosen from Charlotte, Halifax, and Pittsylvania counties, as well as the City of Danville, through an intensive application process.

The Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) will design and create a virtual learning community that allows the Teaching Fellows to participate online with scholars, resources, and materials. Interactive technologies will allow the Fellows to access, author, and contribute work that addresses the connection between understanding the past and imparting this understanding to students.

"Our goal is to create a professional cohort of colleagues who will immerse themselves in the hands-on process of understanding history scholarship and history education," said Andy Mink, Director of Education and Outreach for VCDH, who will serve as the lead facilitator for the Teaching Fellows Program. "I am extremely excited to work with teachers to explore these best practices for their own professional growth and classroom practice."

The Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) advances historical scholarship and facilitates active dialog between scholars, researchers and educators in the digital age.

Teachers will be immersed in the wealth of history throughout the region viewed across the span of American history. During the three-year grant cycle, these teaching Fellows will interact extensively with well-known scholars in the field of American History and will visit regional historic sites; participate in teachers institutes; create content, materials, and teaching resources that can serve all teachers of history in the consortium region and beyond; and host American Origins Speakers Series, a series of programs open to the public.

The grant is designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers' knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American history. Its purpose is to develop a sustainable professional development model to strengthen the teaching of, and improve student performance in, traditional American history by using local history to demonstrate episodes, issues and turning points.

"This region is rich in the people, places, and events of these episodes," states Roberta Culbertson, the author of the grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. These sites include: Red Hill Patrick Henry National Memorial, a courthouse built to plans provided by Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary war battlegrounds traversed by Lord Cornwallis and General Greene, the complete records, letters and diaries of some of the upper South's largest slave plantation, Civil War battlefields at Staunton River Bridge, the last capital of the Confederacy, and large collections of Civil Rights oral histories and news archives.

"It is an honor to be chosen to participate in this program and those teachers participating will receive wonderful opportunities to listen to and talk with famous authors, historians and nationally renowned scholars in their field to gain insight in specific areas," according to Amy Lammerts, Associate Director of Program Development, Marketing and Public Relations at the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center.

"Our ultimate goal is to generate excitement in local history of our region. Hopefully this enthusiasm will spread to students in the classroom and they will realize they have a place in the regional history and will become more vested in it. The teachers chosen to participate in this project already have a love for history and will be enriched through this program focusing on our local history."

The VFH was created in 1974 to develop the civic, cultural, and intellectual life of the Commonwealth. From its inception, the VFH has remained steadfastly dedicated to bringing the humanities fully into Virginia's public life, assisting individuals and communities in their efforts to understand the past, confront issues in the present, and shape a desirable future.

VCDH Partners with NITLE on New Teaching Tool

The Virginia Center for Digital History recently won a $25,000 grant from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) to develop a new wiki-style project that allows students in classrooms across the country to share their research and insights with one another. Dubbed the "History Engine," the new project is aimed at breaking down barriers between students by making peer-learning a central part of the university classroom experience.

The History Engine project centers on a web-based interface where students in participating classrooms can upload their work (in the form of essays based on original research and written under teacher direction) into a centralized database. By tagging these uploaded materials with particular information (such as the location and date of the sources for the essays), the project offers a suite of digital tools that allow students to search and parse the collective work of their fellow students (whether in the same classroom or in ones throughout the country) through the project's searching tools. In all of this, the project promotes peer-learning by creating a collaborative learning environment capable of spanning multiple classrooms and disciplines.

Beginning this fall, students in classrooms from Massachusetts to Florida will be using the History Engine, collectively contributing to a growing portrait of American history. Participating schools will include the University of Virginia, Furman University, Wheaton College, Rollins College, the University of Richmond, and Juniata College.

The History Engine is the brainchild of VCDH founder and pioneering digital historian Edward L. Ayers, who envisioned a collaborative research tool for students in his Southern history classes and a cumulative digital archive for the work they produced. Development of the project has been ongoing for the past two years, under the direction of project directors Andrew J. Torget and Scott Nesbit. Rachel Shapiro serves as the project manager, and Bill Covert as the project's programmer.

Valley Project Research Prompts Pennsylvania Town to Rewrite Its History

Aug. 22, 2007 -- The annual celebration of a Pennsylvania town's 1858 defiance of the United States' fugitive slave law, part of the Indiana County borough's Diamond Days festival, will soon be updated and revised thanks to a historical newspaper article found on VCDH's Valley of the Shadow Project.

Area residents each year reenact the attempted re-capture of a fugitive slave, who until recently was known in the historical record only as "Newton." During a recent exploration of the Valley Project, however, Denise Jennings-Doyle, vice-president of the Blairsville Area Underground Railroad Project, discovered a news article in the Staunton Spectator which contained previously unknown information about the incident, including a full name for the runaway: "Richard Newman."

Based on the account in the Staunton Spectator, the annual celebration will be updated and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission's historical marker commemorating the event will be revised.

The Pittsburgh Tribune Review featured a full story on the discovery, "Capture of slave in Blairsville revised," in its August 17, 2007 edition:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_522656.html

Jamestown Celebration Puts VCDH Projects/Programs in Media Spotlight

As America commemorates the 400^th anniversary of the first permanent English colonial settlement at Jamestown (1607-2007), the Virginia Center for Digital History's Virtual Jamestown project and related K-12 outreach programs are attracting local, national, and international attention.

Last week, Charlottesville's Daily Progress published a front-page news article highlighting the collaboration between VCDH historians and local teachers on Jamestown educational activities through a five-district Teaching American History grant program ("Digging History: Grant Pays for Area teachers to Tour, Work at Jamestown," Daily Progress, May 5, 2007.") The article called attention to VCDH's ongoing efforts, led by Andy Mink, Director of Outreach and Education, to enrich history education and bridge the traditional divide between classroom teachers and scholars in the field. Progress reporter Matt Deegan wrote:

Eighteen teachers from Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Greene, Madison and Orange will tour Jamestown Island with history professors, work on the archaeological dig site where the Powhatan Indians lived and have a roundtable talk with Virginia Indian leaders.
The trip is part of the three-year, $1 million Teaching American History grant that was awarded to five area school divisions last May.
By sending teachers to historical sites and connecting them directly with history gathering, they will be able to do a better job of bringing history to life in their own classrooms, said Andy Mink, who is overseeing the grant program's activities.
"What we're trying to do is introduce the idea that in teaching history, there's not one answer," said Mink, the director of outreach and education at the Virginia Center for Digital History. "There shouldn't be a 'circle B on the SOL and we're done' mindset. They need to think beyond the rote memorization, fill-in-the-bubble mentality. Being a historian is being a field reporter and constantly questioning and seeking answers."

The article noted that Crandall Shifflett, a Virginia Tech historian, would be guiding the teachers on their Jamestown field trip (scheduled for June 25-29) and introducing them to the digital resources he has created as founding director of Virtual Jamestown. Developed over the past ten years with major support from corporate, foundation, and private donors, Virtual Jamestown is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment."

Shifflett told the Progress he hoped the Virtual Jamestown web site, with its maps, diary entries, and other primary source documents, would keep the debate alive for students around the world. "Students in the cornfields of Virginia and the halls of Cambridge can access and digest the same sources," Shifflett said. "That was impossible for my generation."

Virtual Jamestown attracted some 350,000 unique visitors last year and is on pace to attract nearly a half million visitors this anniversary year. EDSITEment: Best of the Humanities on the Web, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is showcasing the Virtual Jamestown website in its May NEH Spotlight feature on Jamestown. Thinkfinity (formerly MarcoPolo), the educational arm of the Verizon Foundation, will be promoting the feature through its network of educators, directing thousands of teachers to the Virtual Jamestown website and its resources.

Shifflett reports that the Jamestown anniversary has generated international interest as well. Last week, he was "interviewed" via email by a reporter for Russia's Pravda daily newspaper (circulation 100,000) for an article on the founding of Jamestown.

VCDH Celebrates Valley of Shadow's Completion;
Bids Farewell to Founding Visionary Ed Ayers

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Ed and Anne Rubin

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Andrew Torget
Presents "The Shirt"

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Ed and "The Shirt"

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Ed Rocks!

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Scott Nesbit

On Monday, April 9, 2007, the Virginia Center for Digital History threw a party to celebrate the completion of its award-winning Valley of the Shadow project and bid farewell to Edward L. Ayers, the founding visionary behind the Center and its widely acclaimed Civil War archive.

Valley Project Managers past (Anne Rubin, 1993-96) and present (Scott Nesbit, 2005-06; Andrew Torget, 2003-present;) were on hand for the party, as well as about two dozen staff and alumni who played pivotal roles in the project. Friends and colleagues, many with ties to VCDH, crowded into Alderman Library's Taylor Room to watch as Torget presented Ayers with a commemorative T-Shirt that captured the buoyant spirit of the event. On the front: the smiling face of Ayers, appended to the body of a Union general. On the back: a statistical overview of the 15-year Valley campaign.

Valley of the Shadow
1993-2007

450,000 unique visitors every day
153,572 individual census records
15,864 pages of newspapers covering 55 years
6,430 dossiers of individual soldiers
3,956 church records
1,786 individual letters
1,500 reports from the armies
816 Freedmen's Bureau documents
152 memory of the war articles
138 battle records
106 Southern Claims Commission petitions
47 GIS maps
40 different diaries
15 years of hard work
3 books (so far)
2 communities
1 Revolutionary Idea

VCDH director Scot French presented Ayers with an antique cherry ladder-back arm rocker — the ideal gift, French said, for "a man who can't sit still."

Honoring a Digital Pioneer

An accomplished scholar in the field of Southern history (Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century South; Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction), Ayers launched the Valley project in 1993 as an experiment in applied technology and collaborative historical inquiry. He assembled a team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers to digitize and display archival materials — newspapers, diaries, military records, etc. — with the goal of illuminating the interconnected worlds of two communities in the American Civil War: Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. In opening the scholar's archive to public scrutiny, Ayers' Valley project generated excitement both within and beyond the academy.

Inspired by the Valley's success and eager to replicate the model, Ayers and then-Valley Project Manager Will Thomas cofounded VCDH in 1997 with the aim of transforming the teaching and learning of history in the Digital Age. The Center's current roster of projects — Virtual Jamestown, The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, The Dolley Madison Project, Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South, The Countryside Transformed: The Railroad and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, to name just a few — bears witness to the Valley's far-reaching influence.

Thomas, who left the University of Virginia in 2005 to become the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, sent a special message to mark the completion of the Valley project. He wrote:

Ed's vision for this project was unfailingly generous and at the same time ambitious for us all. I am struck by how many of us were able to share in the Valley project's remarkable success. And I'm grateful and glad to have been a part of it… The spirit of generosity that Ed put at the center of the work is something to hold onto in all that we do — that vision of inclusiveness, that we all have something to contribute to this exciting enterprise. That is worth celebrating because it is so rare and so wonderful.

Valley veterans Ayers and Thomas will continue to collaborate with VCDH through their Aurora: History in Four Dimensions project, which was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Information Technology section last November.

The Valley as a Crucible for Digital Scholarship

VCDH Director Scot French notes that the Valley project is perhaps most impressive as an example of how digital history can advance both scholarship and K-12 outreach. Both the web archive and a CD-ROM version of the Valley project (published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2000) have won numerous awards, including:

the first annual eLincoln Prize in 2001 from the Gettysburg College, "awarded annually by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, or the American Civil War soldier;"
the 2002 James Harvey Robinson prize, awarded by the American Historical Association "for the teaching aid that has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching of history; and
the 2005 Classics Award from MERLOT, an academic organization dedicated to reviewing and recognizing the best digital teaching materials available online.

In 2003, Ayers's first book based on the Valley project — In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of American, 1859-1863 — was published by W.W. Norton and Company. It has since received the 2004 Bancroft Prize for a distinguished book in American History and the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award, for the best English-language book on the history of the U.S., Canada, or Latin America from 1492 to the present.

Also in 2003, a digital article co-authored by Ayers and Thomas and based on the Valley project, "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," was published by The American Historical Review.

Last year, W.W. Norton published an anthology of primary sources — Two Communities in the Civil War: A Norton Casebook in History — co-edited by Ayers and Torget.

VCDH Press Release…

Virginia Center For Digital History Receives Vfh Planning Grant For Virginia Emigrants To Liberia Project

A new Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) project now under development will provide access to data on these Virginia emigrants to Liberia — including detailed shipboard census information on individuals and family groupings — along with supplemental teaching and research guides for those interested in exploring Virginia/African-American/Atlantic World history through the lens of colonization.

VCDH has received a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to develop humanities content and do planning and basic production for a digital archive and exhibit, "Virginia Emigrants to Liberia: A Window into Slave and Free Black Life in the Old Dominion." The site will offer public access to a searchable database of Virginia emigrants, an introductory contextual essay and bibliography, primary sources and web links, and examples of Standards of Learning (SOL) projects drawn from the data. The resulting archive, to be hosted and maintained by VCDH, will have multiple uses for educational institutions, museums, archives, and libraries.

Broadly collaborative in design, the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia project builds on the painstaking research of two leading historians of Virginia colonization: Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw, author of the forthcoming book An African Republic: Black And White Virginians In The Making Of Liberia (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and Dr. Deborah A. Lee, who has written and researched on women colonizationists, the Underground Railroad, and antislavery in northern Virginia. Beginning last year, with financial support from private donors, Tyler-McGraw and Lee created a database of all Virginia emigrants from 1820 to 1843. Later, working with Karen H. White of the AfroAmerican Historical Association of Fauquier County, Tyler-McGraw and Lee received a discretionary fund grant from VFH to encode the emigrants from 1843 to 1865, adding additional information on Virginia emancipators by county, a brief introduction to the data, and a bibliography.

The VCDH digital archive and exhibit will expand upon the information now in the database with additional primary sources, links to other online resources, and supplementary humanities content that will enable users to ask questions that go beyond comparative statistics. ACS ships' lists include valuable data on newly manumitted slaves, similar to that available for free blacks in the federal census: age, place of birth, literacy level, occupation or skills, and family group. Combined with information on emancipators, local origins, and the correspondence of Liberian settlers, this body of data offers a rich source of information on free black and slave life in antebellum Virginia. The database also includes additional personal information drawn primarily from the 1843 Liberian census, the Liberian correspondence held at the Library of Congress, and the Ethnomusicology Archive at Indiana University.

As a second part of the website development, Tyler-McGraw and Lee will develop narratives of the lives of nine Virginia emigrant families and the experiences of three emancipated groups. To facilitate research on other emigrants, a "kit" of primary resources will be assembled and some key questions posed. Researchers may choose to construct the story of a family, find all the emigrants on a particular ship, or calculate the contrasts between ACS promotional materials, the abolitionist critique, and the Liberian reality.

VCDH director Scot French hailed the project as a unique opportunity to apply digital technologies to research data that, in the past, might have been discarded upon completion of an article or book manuscript. "Thanks to the tireless efforts of Marie Tyler-McGraw and Deborah Lee, the public will have access to a digital archive with unlimited potential for development and expansion. These two scholars, working in traditional archives, have compiled data of enormous significance to the study of slavery, freedom, race, and nationality on both sides of the Atlantic. What can these ACS records tell us about the lives of these emigrants and the peculiar circumstances of their trans-Atlantic voyages? And how might new technologies enhance our ability to mine this data for teaching and research? These are the questions VCDH and its collaborating partners will be addressing, with critical grant support from the VFH."

Project consultants include French, whose book The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) examines the immediate impact of Turner's 1831 rebellion on the colonization movement in Virginia, and U.Va. historian Reginald D. Butler, a specialist in slavery and free black life in the Chesapeake region. VCDH Director of K-12 and Outreach Andy Mink will consult on the development of supplemental teaching materials.

The American Colonization Society was organized in Washington, D.C. late in 1816 by a group of prominent white men, chiefly clergymen and upper South politicians, who sought financial support from Congress for the colonization of free blacks and newly manumitted slaves outside the United States. In 1820, with diplomatic and military support from the US government, the ACS established in western Africa a colony that came to be called Liberia. Despite vocal opposition from free blacks in the North and considerable resistance from free blacks in the South, the ACS recruited thousands of emigrants from the slaveholding states of the Chesapeake region. The ACS was responsible for sending more than 13,000 African Americans to Liberia between February 1820 and December 1866. Virginia sent more than any other state at 3,733, according to an 1867 tally in the Society's journal.

Recent VCDH Events

VCDH to Partner with Area Schools on $1 Million Teaching American History Grant, "America on the World Stage: A Global Perspective to U.S. History"