Message-Id: <199904162059.NAA36296@dns.ccit.arizona.edu> Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 17:01:54 -0400 From: Tamara Swora-Gober <mailto:tswo@LOC.GOV> Subject: LC National Digital Library Program announces release of the To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
This information is being widely cross-posted.From: Library of Congress National Digital Library Program mailto:ndlpcoll@loc.gov
The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the Manuscript Division announce the first release of the Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress on the American Memory Collections website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mtjhtml/
The Thomas Jefferson Papers consist of approximately twenty-seven thousand items representing the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Included are correspondence, commonplace books, account books, and manuscript volumes. In its online presentation, the Thomas Jefferson Papers comprises approximately eighty-three thousand images. When completely online, students, teachers, and life-long learners will be able to explore the history of Jefferson's thoughts on politics, slavery, religion, and other subjects; his decades-long political partnership with James Madison; and his friendships with John and Abigail Adams, William Short, and others.
This first release includes the first installment of Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651-1827, and all of Series 8, the Virginia Records, 1606-1737, volumes relating to Virginia colonial history that were collected by Jefferson himself. Approximately twenty thousand images appear in this release. They were scanned from 35mm microfilm of the collection and are presented in grayscale in 4-bit GIF format for preview and in 8-bit JPEG File Interchange Format for archival reference. A few transcriptions accompany images in Series 1, General Correspondence; many more will be available in a future release.
Series 1 documents offered in this first release date from 1651 through 1789 and cover Jefferson's activities as delegate to the first and second Continental Congresses, including his drafting of the Declaration of Causes & Necessity for Taking Up Arms and the Declaration of Independence; his two terms as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution; his subsequent return to Congress, where he drafted the Ordinance of 1784 for the admittance of new western states to the Union. Also falling within this firstinstallment is his appointment as minister plenipotentiary in Europe and then as minister to the Court of Louis XVI, succeeding Benjamin Franklin.
Series 8, Virginia Records, 1606-1737, consists of twenty volumes of historical materials relating to the settlement and early history of colonial Virginia. The pre-eminent volume is the only surviving contemporaneous copy of the Court Book, 1619-1624, of the Virginia Company of London, which established the Jamestown colony in 1607. The Court Book is accompanied online by page images of the four-volume RECORDS OF THE VIRGINIA COMPANY (1906; 1933-1935), edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury. Other volumes in Series 8 are contemporaneous copies and compilations of laws and legislative records and a manuscript copy of Thomas Mathew's 1705 account of Bacon's rebellion accompanied by the text of Thomas Jefferson's transcription as published in the Richmond Enquirer in 1804.
A Virginia Records Time Line, 1553-1743, provides historical context for Series 8 and links to documents in its volumes. The Thomas Jefferson Time Line, 1743-1827, provides a chronology of important events in Jefferson's life and similar links that bring users into the manuscript collection. Both time lines are richly enhanced with images of documents, maps, broadsides, and portraits. Selected bibliographies on Virginia history and on Thomas Jefferson are also provided.
Appearing online in this first release as a special presentation is Joseph J. Ellis's essay "American Sphinx: The Contradictions of Thomas Jefferson," which originally appeared in CIVILIZATION: THE MAGAZINE OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS in 1994, before the publication of his biography, AMERICAN SPHINX: THE CHARACTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON (1997). A link from this essay takes users to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation's Web site, "Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson," and its presentation of articles and other online materials about Sally Hemings, the Hemings family, and Jefferson and slavery at Monticello.