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Web Site Review
Roy Rosenzweig
Contributing Editor
The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web <http://historymatters.gmu.edu>, publishes regular reviews of Web sites. The reviews will appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at <http://www.historycooperative.org>) and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than eight hundred Web sites for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the best Web sites and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers.
The Web reviews are edited by Roy Rosenzweig; please contact him at <roy@gmu.edu> if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/jah/>.
| Thomas Jefferson Papers <http://memory.loc. gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/>>. Created and maintained by the Library of Congress. Reviewed June 11–16, 2004.
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| Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive <http:// etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/>. Created and maintained by the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Reviewed June 11–16, 2004. |
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| Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about twenty thousand letters and received many more, may well have amassed one of the largest and most consequential collections of correspondence in American history. He did so not only by devoting a significant portion of his life to the enterprise but also by systematically copying, preserving, filing, and cataloging these and other texts, such as public addresses, legal documents, and the prose and poetry that he extracted in his literary commonplace books. The result is an extraordinarily rich body of work reflecting the drama of Jefferson's era, the diversity of his interests, and the importance of his contributions. Thus these two excellent Web sites—which make available to an unprecedented number of people an unprecedented number of Jefferson's papers—perform a remarkable public service. They also serve as instructive examples of how Internet archives can and cannot replace traditional resources such as manuscripts collections and edited compilations. |
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The Thomas Jefferson Papers Web site provides high-quality digital images (and sometimes transcriptions) of the Library of Congress's unparalleled collection of Jefferson's incoming and outgoing letters, legal and literary commonplace books, financial records, and other written items. Taken together, these 27,000 documents consist of about 83,000 manuscript pages. Users of the site can either browse the collection, which is divided among ten categories (General Correspondence, Account Books, Commonplace Books, Miscellaneous Bound Volumes, etc.), or search by keyword. Most will find the latter method more useful and efficient, for all of the documents are searchable by date, author, and (in the case of letters) recipient. Some, moreover, are linked to searchable full-text transcriptions taken from collections such as Paul Leicester Ford's Works of Thomas Jefferson (12 vols., 1904–1905) and John C. Fitzpatrick's Writings of George Washington (39 vols., 1931–1944). As a result, typing "Monroe and 1815" into the search engine yields links to a total of four documents containing both words. These include two 1815 letters (January 1 and July 15) from Jefferson to James Monroe as well as letters from Jefferson to William H. Crawford (February 14, 1815) and Spencer Roane (October 12, 1815). In his notes to Crawford and Roane, both of which appear in Ford's Works of Jefferson, the third president refers by name to the future fifth president. |
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