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Web Site Review
Kelly Schrum
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 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 one thousand 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 Kelly Schrum; please contact her at kschrum@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://www.indiana.edu/~jah/websitereviews.shtml.
| The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu:8100/dmde/. University of Virginia Press. Edited by Holly C. Shulman. Reviewed Oct. 1–Nov. 3, 2006.The Dolley Madison Project, http://moderntimes.vcdh.virginia.edu/madison/. Virginia Center for Digital History. Edited by Holly C. Shulman and David B. Mattern. Reviewed Oct. 1–Nov. 3, 2006.
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| Dolley Madison is arguably the most important first lady of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, several books have been written about her, and her letters have been collected, organized, and published. Lucia B. Cutts, the granddaughter of Dolley Madison's sister Anna Payne Cutts, compiled the first collection of the former first lady's letters in Memoirs and Letters of Dolly Madison (1886). Yet, only selected letters were included in the work in order to present her relative in a favorable light. In 1914 the historian Allen C. Clark published an expanded version of Mrs. Madison's letters, Life and Letters of Dolly Madison, offering a more complete look at "Queen Dolly," as he called her. Once again, however, the collection of letters was scrubbed clean by the editor in order to present a friendly reading of the subject. Clark opened his book with the famous line: "The incomparable Dolly!" |
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The latest edition to the Dolley Madison collection, The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison (2003), edited by David B. Mattern and Holly C. Shulman, differs from the previous collections in that it includes more letters and does not attempt to sanitize the selections. Most importantly, this collection of letters influenced the development of the two Web sites under review. |
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The Dolley Madison Digital Edition is the first complete edition of all known correspondence of the wife of the fourth president of the United States, containing roughly two thousand letters. Although many letters are simply thank-you notes or polite responses to social invitations, others offer rich insights into the personality and experiences of the First Lady, especially those exchanged with her sisters. |
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The letters are organized into five periods: birth and youth; the years as wife of the secretary of state; the years as first lady; retirement; and widowhood. Researchers can search the database by names, dates, topics, and even 659 Web Site Reviews places. A helpful table of contents lists the letters by date, author, and recipient. With historical integrity, all letters retain any original misspellings and word usage specific to the time. The editors added to the original letters only a date at the top when one was missing. |
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