Something is going on in the world of contemporary poetry—history is flooding in. Poets are pursuing history and its dilemmas head-on; they are using primary source material to flesh out social, political, and lyric imaginaries; they are ransacking the tools of historiography to provision all manner of aesthetic expeditions. Within the last ten years or so, such creative inclinations have quietly evolved into a major, and pervasive, mode of literary production. History lovers, take note: these poets’ research work is thorough and driven, their archive instincts are free-range, even feral, and their use of historical source runs from the beautiful to the bizarre.

Why are so many twenty-first-century poets weaving American history into their process and product? What are the effects of this literary-historical groundswell? The answers are forthcoming, issue by issue, here in Common-place. Each edition of this new column will present the work of a poet whose creative process is deeply engaged with historical research. We will read their poems. And the poets will also give us something new, something the literary world hasn’t asked for yet, a Statement of Poetic Research—poets’ own descriptions of history’s influences on their art, how they approach (and are altered by) research, and the new ways they hope their work brings history to readers.

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The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

http://www.emilydickinson.org/

In the technological fervor of the 1990s, the online archive was the primary site for early digital humanities work, the next stage for librarians and archivists, and the unfamiliar to traditional analog material-driven scholars. According to some, digitization has reignited the canon wars, with the most “prestigious” (sometimes misread as “deserving”) authors being fitted for online outfits. It was in this period that the canon of digital preservation projects began forming, with some of the earliest being the William Blake Archive housed at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stephen Railton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (hosted at the University of Virginia) and the Walt Whitman Archive, currently led and edited by Ed Folsom (University of Iowa) and Kenneth Price (University of Nebraska). The Web became a new frontier for many scholars, extending the presence of the now seemingly ubiquitous digital humanities, and providing alternate methods to facilitate research for academics still focused on the text. With this phenomenon came new discussions of textual scholarship and editing practices, an increasing awareness of how encoding was an act of interpretation, and the theorization of the material as it moved from analog to a digital format.

Amidst these discussions was the Dickinson Electronic Archives, a repository for Dickinson’s writings and a site for born-digital scholarship directed by Martha Nell Smith at the University of Maryland. The DEA holds encoded images of the manuscripts or transcriptions of Dickinson’s writings, including correspondences, and the writings of family members like Susan Dickinson (Emily’s sister-in-law). In addition, the DEA has produced critical exhibitions on various topics in Dickinson scholarship. Smith has long been a voice in the digital humanities community, presiding over the DEA since its inception amid the archive-mania of the 1990s, as well as advocating for digital work as being just as research-driven and rigorous as traditional literary scholarship. This is represented by some of the earlier exhibitions from the site, like the born-digital examinations of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence which, alongside representations of the manuscripts, seeks to demonstrate how Dickinson’s writing, no matter the medium, seemed to come under the influence of her poetic abilities. The DEA was not just a place for the hosting of manuscript images and transcriptions, but also served as an active producer of scholarship and a resource for researchers to find new arguments, theses, as well as teaching tools for Dickinson studies. And impressively, the site has not ceased updating and producing.

It is noteworthy when an online archive goes against what seems to be the expectation of abandonment in the digital sphere and continues to reinvent itself in the face of newer technologies, methods, and ideas. The DEA has been such an example, with its recent redesign, a complete facelift for the archive, accompanied by a feature of a new daguerreotype thought to be of Emily Dickinson. A new image of the poet seems the perfect fit as an introduction to a new look for the archive, but the updated version of the DEA represents more than a simple aesthetic makeover. The new DEA maintains Smith’s consciousness of the evolution that scholarship undergoes online, presenting two new exhibitions at the time of this review’s composition: “1859 Daguerreotype: Is This Emily Dickinson?” and “Ravished Slates: A Scholarly Exploration of Material Evidence,” each of which make use of the possibilities of digital technology, as one would expect of an electronic archive, with photographic slide shows, external links, and even commentary and meditation on the exploration (and contextualization) of physical archives.

But more than just reiterating the practices that Smith extolled in the previous version of the DEA, the new archive features more forward-thinking methods of literary scholarship by attempting to create an active community. The discussion forum section of the DEA was meant to facilitate and “advance the conversation” about the archive’s exhibitions, especially the daguerreotype. There is more focus on collaboration in this incarnation of the archive, with an open invitation for essays and responses from the site’s patrons, both scholarly and even “more personal and reflective,” a seeming invitation to undergraduate or classroom involvement with the site. The DEA is interested in connecting the Dickinson fans of the world; rather than being a one-way source of information for the reader, the inclusion of a space for discussion and collaboration allows for the DEA to become a place where knowledge and critical investigation can be formed in a more overt way. This view of the site is in line with Smith’s previous arguments for the viability of digital work as real scholarship, but also for centering the work of humanists on the dialogues they form around particular ideas, and transposing that into a visible online medium.

At this point, however, the discussion has not been as active as it could be. The forum for the “Ravished Slates” exhibition saw no activity other than an introductory post by Smith, though the discussion board for the daguerreotype saw a decent amount of activity, with forty-nine posts (although the last one was made on December 26, 2012). The discussion here was a collection of individuals engaged in analyzing the image, including the owner (“Sam Carlo”) of the daguerreotype, and they compared historical notes, suggested methods for inspecting the photograph, and theorized about the popular perception of Dickinson as the somber teenage girl whose portrait is reprinted in anthologies versus this more recently discovered image and its more mature subject. The thread was productive and lively because the archive enables this sort of scholarly discussion, but it would have benefitted from more voices and a longer lifespan to bring one of the largest features of the new DEA to life. With increased visibility, and perhaps more progress on the research of the new daguerreotype, this part of the site could flourish and become what it seems intended to be.

The new DEA is conscious that the old should not totally replace the new, but rather enhance and complicate it. Smith, after all, is a textual scholar and editor, aware of the qualities of the previous version of the DEA she left behind when upgrading to the new version. So that the history of the site is not forgotten, the 1994-2012 edition of the DEA is still viewable and easily found via the newer interface, giving the audience the chance to see where the newer format for the site comes from and the changes it has made, visually but especially content-wise. The content of the older site remains relegated to that section, even the writings of Dickinson, though they will also find a home in new online archives created by Harvard and Amherst College (borrowing from Smith’s XML encoding in the DEA). However, it is uncertain whether those will be migrated and become primary features of the new site, or if readers will need to find them by trekking through the older interface.

With a radical update like the DEA’s, we can see how the scholars engaged with this sort of work continue to think about their approach to digital scholarship. There is the temptation to treat online archives like monograph projects: research, write, publish, and leave behind, and the lack of funding for the continuous staff, server, and upkeep can sometimes dictate this decision. But online archives and other such projects require constant attention to remain in the forefront of the humanities’ discourse. This is what the DEA attempts to do by implementing, with its new exhibitions, a new ideology behind the way research in the twenty-first century is conducted. As the 1859 daguerreotype shows, information does not remain static, and neither should that which is responsible for holding it. Not only is the archive to be perused and drawn from, but it should invite contribution and discussion if it is to serve researchers’ needs.

Nigel Lepianka is a graduate student in English at Texas A&M University, where he works on American literature, textual criticism, and digital humanities.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html

In recent years, scholars have increasingly strived to digitize the rich documentary history of the development of the United States. Several Websites, including Yale University Law School’s impressive Avalon Project, have made great strides in making available to the public many of the political tracts that shaped America’s founding and the creation of the national government. Few, however, match the depth and breadth of the Library of Congress’s A Century of Lawmaking For a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875. Part of the library’s National Digital Library Program, this database aims to “offer broad public access to a wide range of historical documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.” The expansion of online historical content is one component of the library’s mission to “sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.” Living up to these goals, the database truly offers something for all interested parties.

Four sections of documents organize the Website: the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, Statutes and Documents, Journals of Congress, and the Debates of Congress. Each section is then divided into four subsections, offering further levels of organization which allow scholars to explore in-depth indexes as well as search each area by year. Subsections include the Letters of Delegates to Congress, the Journals of the Continental Congress, the Annals of Congress, and the Statutes at Large, to name but a few. A general search allows users to search the entire Website for information on various topics. A search of “slavery” returned 2,931 items, while the “Articles of Confederation” returned 819 items. For those scholars with more specific parameters, text searches can be qualified by the year, chamber, and session of Congress, as well as limited to any of the sixteen subsections.

Because many of the documents on the Website are transcripts, scholars have the ability to full-text search seemingly thousands of documents in a single, straightforward database, a feature sure to entice serious researchers examining the development of the American government. Browsing the seemingly countless full-text searchable documents, scholars can instantly access over 100 pieces of correspondence between John Adams and James Warren during the nascent stages of the American Revolution. Those interested in the debates surrounding the purchase and exploration of Louisiana will find many relevant items contained within the Annals of Congress as well as in the Senate and House Journals. Although some of these subsections can only be index-searched, the ease of navigation throughout the Website and the abundance of full-text searchable documents more than compensates for this minor drawback.

While the surfeit of searchable texts will undoubtedly attract researchers of various disciplines, the Website also caters to students, teachers, and interested citizens alike, providing links to summaries of major events shaping America’s political development. These links, combining brief summaries with apposite documentation, include special presentations on the making of the U.S. Constitution, a timeline of American history as seen in Congressional documents (1774-1873), Indian land cessions to the United States with included maps (1784-1894), and a journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865), among other useful resources. The timelines may prove especially helpful for educators seeking primary sources to supplement their lectures, as the special presentations point to volumes on the site in which the issues at stake in Congress come vividly to life. Novice researchers will also appreciate the “Citation Guide” and “Using the Collection” links as they begin their research.

In addition to providing thousands of digitized documents for public use, another wonderful feature of the Website is a link to nearly forty additional resources. The “Related Resources on the Internet” link lists pertinent American Memory historical collections provided by the Library of Congress as well as links to transcriptions of the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps most helpful are the external Websites listed, including the aforementioned Avalon Project as well as several databases and research guides to aid even the most veteran historian. Finally, a link to the Library of Congress’s “Learning Page” transports teachers to a site devoted to essential information for professional development. Most useful is a section on classroom materials, supplying teachers with an abundance of primary source sets, lesson plans, presentations, and activities to facilitate historical learning in the classroom.

Gone are the days of poring over microfilm for weeks to find data relevant to particular research interests. With this sleek Website, a few pointed searches can unveil hundreds of pertinent published documents for scholars interested in various topics related to early American history. Produced by the collaborative effort of numerous public and private institutions to provide “a digital record of American history and creativity,” this portion of the American Memory project will undoubtedly inspire creativity among scholars for years to come.

Curtis Urban is a PhD student in early American history at the University of Notre Dame.

http://bdhp.moravian.edu/home/home.html

The Bethlehem Digital History Project (BDHP) is a model of scholarly and institutional collaboration. With its vast online repository of manuscripts and images, it makes an important contribution to the study of Moravians in early American history. While it focuses on the settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741-1844, the project tells a larger story about the cultural transformations that took place from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century. Boasting an impressive list of consultants and contributors, the site has something to offer scholars, teachers, and students.

On its front page, the BDHP presents eight categories of source materials, including essays, documents, and images. The “Community Records,” “Education,” and “Personal Papers” categories are the strongest, with a generous sampling of sources. Digitized manuscripts are well organized, and in many cases, photos of the original documents allow closer examination. The site offers German transcriptions and English translations for much of the material. A number of documents in a section entitled the “Scholars Corner” are in German script only.

There are challenges involved in organizing so much material into a compact organizational scheme on a Website. Though site navigation is mostly clear, there are some user-interface (UI) issues as one goes deeper into sections. When viewing a single manuscript, for example, the visitor encounters no markers providing orientation with respect to the rest of the site. Implementing breadcrumbs at the top of the page would help in this regard. Drop-down menus also might provide greater ease when jumping from one sub-section to another. The “Site Index” page could serve as a tool for navigating through the content, but it seems more likely to be a useful reference for conceptualizing the site as a whole. Further complicating user experience, the top-level navigation menu bar alternates randomly between the left and right columns on various pages; there are also different design templates used for no apparent reason on various parts of the Website.

These minor UI quibbles aside, there is enough material here to satisfy the casual visitor and whet the appetite of a more serious researcher. Selections under “Community Records,” for instance, run the gamut from diaries to store inventories to meeting minutes. The choir diaries with brief excerpts give a snapshot of life in early Bethlehem, whereas the communal diaries of 1742-1763 provide a more panoramic sketch. Thanks to the scrupulous record-keeping of clergy, the marriage registers include detailed information about inhabitants’ provenance, relationships, vocational ventures, and death. The result is a striking 150-year biographical history of the people of Bethlehem that traces desertions, migrations, and other sundry details of community life. Even the gap between December 1775 and August 1778, a period of war and tumult, reflects dislocations in the broader American context. These documents also reveal the changes and challenges the Bethlehem Moravians experienced as they moved from a communal economy to a cash economy oriented around individual families.

The Website provides a taste of the abundant repository of sources available at the various Bethlehem archives. Such is the case with the section on education. From austere boarding school rules and startlingly pointed hygiene instructions to documents relating to the Moravian College and Seminary, we glimpse the community’s concern for the care of its children and youth.

The documents are similarly wide-ranging in the “Personal Papers” section. Divided into journals, letters, and memoirs, this part of the site displays excerpts of English translations, with longer German versions also available. The “Memoirs” sub-section contains thirty-four documents with colorful descriptions of the diverse lot of people who made Bethlehem their home. For example, we can read about the life of Irish-born James Burnside, who served at George Whitefield’s Orphan-House in Savannah for a time before landing at Bethlehem as a Moravian convert. Of the thirteen women represented here, Elizabeth Horsfield stands out as someone who could trace her lineage to the Huguenots during the reign of Louis XIV, was baptized in an Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and made the choice to leave her parents and join the Moravians in June 1775 at the age of twenty-one. One minor complaint is that the memoirs are listed alphabetically by name, which seems a less-than-ideal way to do it. More helpful would have been a chronological ordering, with perhaps birth years printed alongside the names.

Though the scantly populated “Art” and “Music” sections pale in comparison to the abundance of manuscript material elsewhere on the site, these areas still provide a number of pictures well-chosen to furnish the imagination. Some of the images, however, would benefit by increased resolution, as is particularly the case with vivid pictures of drawings and needlework.

In the final analysis, the Bethlehem Digital History Project is a remarkable achievement. Sponsored by the Bethlehem Area Public Library and the Reeves Library of the Moravian College and Theological Seminary, with participants including the Moravian Archives, the Moravian Historical Society, and the Historic Bethlehem Partnership, the BDHP site makes available a treasure trove of information that spans over a century of Moravian community life in Pennsylvania. With Boolean search capability, links to external teaching resources, and a wealth of digitized primary source materials, the site offers visitors much to explore. The ability to obtain a bird’s-eye view of multiple sources for study and comparison, to drill down into particular details and back again, and to make rare primary sources widely available are some of the most compelling advantages of digital history—and the BDHP shines in all these respects.

Peter Choi is a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Notre Dame, currently working on a dissertation on religion and empire in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

https://www.nyhistory.org/web/africanfreeschool/. Site content developed by Anna Mae Duane and Thomas Thurston. Website developed by Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures. Reviewed November 2011 to January 2012.

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in scholarly studies about the history of childhood. In 2003, for example, the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (edited by Paula Fass) was published and included over 400 articles about issues pertaining to the history of children. Moreover, in 2008, the Johns Hopkins University began to publish the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth to share new academic research about the history of children. Examining the history of childhood can be tremendously challenging, however. As leading historian of childhood Peter Stearns has pointed out, children rarely leave written records or speak for themselves.

In an effort to address the challenges of finding primary sources by and about children, a Website hosted by the New-York Historical Society showcases a treasure trove of school records created by black children in nineteenth-century Manhattan. Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection is a beautifully designed site that provides digitized documents from New York City’s African Free School.

The history of New York’s African Free School is a fascinating one and reveals much about the experiences of African American children. White abolitionists of the New York Manumission Society founded the first African Free School in 1787 to teach children subjects like reading, arithmetic, grammar, geography, and lessons in morality. The white founders of the school had a complex relationship with the black students. Whites claimed that it was their responsibility to rescue the children from lives of primitive culture, vice, and immorality. In spite of this paternalistic bent, however, African American students and their parents embraced education, hoping that schooling would improve the future lives of black children.

Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection contains four types of material: digitized images of students’ schoolwork, a historical overview of the African Free School, biographical sketches of black leaders who graduated from the school, and two classroom guides. The digitized images come from one of the four volumes of African Free School documents housed at the New-York Historical Society, the Penmanship and Drawing Studies, 1816-26, Volume 4. Choosing to digitize the schoolwork images seems like a wise choice given that they provide insights into the experiences of black children themselves. The Website does not showcase the other three volumes of archival material, which primarily contain meeting minutes, reports of visiting committees, and public addresses. Until now, the four volumes of material from the African Free Schools have only been available for use within the New-York Historical Society manuscript collection.

The Website is simply elegant. Developed by the Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures (recently reorganized as the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship), the Website is extremely easy to navigate. Users can view thumbnail images of the primary documents, which have been meticulously prepared and organized. Once a document has been selected, a larger image of the original appears along with a description of the document and a transcript. Moreover, visitors can limit their search to specific genres of schoolwork, including cartography, literary work, or mathematics.

In addition to including these digitized documents, the Website also includes a thorough historical overview of the school, including a timeline of black history in New York City and an interactive map of black New York. This contextual information helps visitors to understand the racial climate in the city when the school opened.

The Website also contains biographical sketches of prominent graduates from the school, including controversial activist Henry Highland Garnet as well as Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge. The site also provides a biography of Charles Andrews, the white schoolmaster who was dismissed for his support of colonization. Through these short biographies, the Website reveals the historical controversies over the goals and curriculum of the African Free School.

The materials on the site are useful for both researchers and secondary teachers. The site contains two classroom guides for use with students in grades 9-12. The lesson plans are extremely thorough and include primary documents from the Website as well as clearly articulated learning activities. The lesson plans could also be used in a variety of courses, including American History, English Literature, or African American History.

Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection should be considered a model Website for showcasing archival material for both researchers interested in the history of children and K-12 classroom use.

Jane Dabel is an associate professor at California State University, Long Beach, and editor ofThe History Teacher. She is the author of A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-century New York City, and is currently working on a project about the experiences of black children in antebellum New York.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Few American authors have been as identifiable as Mark Twain, with his all-white suit, push-broom mustache, and unruly hair. A century after his death, many Americans recognize his photograph. However, most people probably do not know that in addition to writing, lecturing, and fashioning himself as a living myth, Twain also dabbled as an inventor of new technologies, eventually securing three patents. In fact, Twain was so keen on science and technology, and especially on the advance of printing technologies, that he sank $300,000 (nearly $7.6 million today) into the Paige typesetting machine, which was to revolutionize the printing industry. But the machine failed to take off, and in 1894 Twain filed for bankruptcy.

It seems fitting, then, that in the most recent chapter of the printing revolution—the Age of Digital Publishing—scholars, documentary editors, and archivists have taken their own innovative approaches to establishing an online presence for all-things-Twain. In the process, two Websites have set a new standard of excellence for digital archives and literary scholarship, essentially taking two important Twain collections out of their academic settings and offering them to the general public. The first, the Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO), is the database portion of the Mark Twain Papers & Project [http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/], a documentary editing venture started in the 1960s at the University of California-Berkeley; and the second, Mark Twain in His Times, is an interactive online archive and exhibit digitized from a portion of the University of Virginia’s Barrett Collection of American Literature.

The Mark Twain Project Online

According to its “About the Site” section, the Mark Twain Project Onlineis the product of “four decades’ worth of archival research” at Berkeley and elsewhere. In time, the efforts of that research, amounting to seventy volumes ofThe Works and Papers of Mark Twain (thirty volumes have been published), will be completely available online. For now, however, the MTPO is a good beginning, a functional resource that suggests how indispensable users will find the finished product.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the MTPO is very attractive, featuring a user-friendly home page with a two-column interface. Within those columns users will find information about the site and the project, a detailed user guide, and a link (“innovative technology” in the “About This Site” section) to a lengthy “Online Technical Summary” which explains how the creators of theMTPO conceived of and realized the site.

The heart of the MTPO, however, appears in a horizontal navigation bar at the top of the screen. There, users find links to the various databases maintained by the site, including “Letters” (incoming and outgoing), “Writings,” “Images,” and “Biographies” (featuring links to nearly seventy biographical sketches of Twain contemporaries who appear in the databases). While the databases are all searchable (and contain helpful searching tips), many of them also feature a left-hand sidebar that allows the user to browse by decade, material format, names, repository, or availability (since only a small, but growing, percentage of Twain’s papers are available in full-text or as digital scans).

The breadth of material in the MTPO is seemingly limitless, and though the site would be useful for any one with an interest in Twain or in nineteenth-century American literature in general, the potential searching and browsing combinations could overwhelm even the most seasoned researcher. Fortunately, the design of each database is fairly straightforward and, in fact, seems to encourage cross-database queries.

For example, one could use the “Letters” section to browse through Twain’s correspondence from the 1870s (3,622 of the 31,000-plus letters indexed on the site) to discover communications with other writers, and become interested by the literary and cultural views of the critic and novelist William Dean Howells (257 letters in the 1870s, 909 letters total). After reading a few exchanges between Twain and Howells, the user might become eager to learn more about their friendship. Conveniently, the user could visit the “Writings” section to searchThe Autobiography of Mark Twain (a surprise bestseller published by the University of California Press in November 2010) for anecdotes about Howells and other contemporaries.

Mark Twain in His Times

Though no less valuable than theMTPO, the University of Virginia’s Mark Twain in His Timesopts for a more exhibit-oriented approach, aimed at “readers, scholars, students, and teachers.” Curated by Professor Stephen Railton of the UVA Department of English, the site includes images of manuscripts, contemporary reviews and articles, games (such as a “Memory Builder” game Twain designed to help his children remember the English monarchs), and descriptions of Twain collectibles (including dolls, flour, shoes, and cookbooks).

The layout of the home page is clear and easy to navigate, featuring twelve boxes containing links to mini-exhibits on important aspects of Twain’s professional and personal identities. Six of the boxes pertain to Twain’s most famous publications, including Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Three of the boxes address other aspects of Twain’s life and career (one on Twain the Lecturer, one on the marketing of Twain’s books, and another on the divide between Twain’s public and private personas). The remaining three boxes are included for navigational purposes. “About the Site” allows the user to learn more about Mark Twain in His Times and offers tutorials about how to use the site. “Sample This Site” gives the user a broad idea of what types of information are contained in the archives. “Search” links to not just one search function, but five. The user can search: 1) the entire site; 2) Twain’s works; 3) reviews of his books and lectures; 4) obituaries of Twain; or 5) the texts, reviews, and obituaries together.

These features are significantly supplemented and enhanced by hundreds of well-chosen illustrations. Browsing, the user may find articles about the representation of Jim in Huckleberry Finn, supported by the abhorrent cartoons used in the book’s earliest editions. One may find reviews of Twain’s lectures, replete with photographs and audio from his never-ending circuit tour. Or one might come across an article about the marketing of Twain’s books, featuring images of the sales prospectus used by door-to-door salesmen as they pitched Tom Sawyer to readers in Abilene and elsewhere.

In designing easy-to-use, comprehensive digital archives on the life and times of Mark Twain, the teams at Berkeley and UVA have provided users with two definitive online resources for all-things-Twain. One of the main reasons the sites are so valuable is that their creators have shown an implicit understanding of the importance of user accessibility, one of the key elements in maintaining successful digital archives. Thus, it seems safe to say that as long as both projects maintain focus on the user, their digital archives will remain vital resources for the abiding legions of Twain fans.

Ryan A. Ross is an archivist at the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections in the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

http://cdrh.unl.edu/projects/projects_publications.php.

Although the Center for Digital Research hosts nearly thirty different Website projects, this review focuses on two of those particular projects. One is titled “American Indian Treaties Portal,” and the other is titled “Omaha Indian Heritage.” Each provides valuable services to a wide range of parties in terms of content. However, the delivery of that content is not as accessible or effectively organized as one might like.

The “American Indian Treaties Portal” appears to be the creation of Dr. Charles D. Bernholz, the Government Documents librarian at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Clicking on the title link brings the reader to a page that lists eight different topics related to American Indian treaties. The diverse topics range from nine early agreements not included in Charles Kappler’s famous published collection of treaties to a textual analysis of all 375 acknowledged Indian treaties using software known as TokenX. Similarly, the method of presentation includes everything from a brief biography of Charles Kappler to a list of links to articles written primarily by Bernholz about treaties mentioned in federal court cases. In that respect it would first appear that there is something for everyone on this site. Civil War aficionados may very well be intrigued by the link to all of the treaties negotiated by the Confederate States of America with the Indian nations residing west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory in 1861. For specialists in American Indian history, the in-depth analysis of the variations of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 is both informative and comprehensive.

Yet even as the breadth of information presented is wonderful to see, the organization of the material needs improvement. In short, it is not clear if there is a specific target audience for the site. More than anything, the collection at the moment appears to reflect the particular interest and focus of Dr. Bernholz more than it does the demands of any specific audience. For example, while a comprehensive textual analysis of all the Indian treaties recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is enlightening, the information is presented within a technical discussion that makes most of the important conclusions too difficult to find.

By clicking on the project description found on the “Omaha Indian Heritage” site, the reader sees that it is “an effort to make Omaha artifacts and photographic images more available.” This effort is represented by four categories of materials. First, the online texts section contains links to twenty-one articles written since 1881 on Omaha life and history. The second and third categories are photographs from the 1850s to the 1930s, and artifacts from a host of domestic and international museums and historical societies. The fourth and final section provides links to additional online cultural and historical resources for those interested in learning more about the Omaha people.

As with the Indian treaties portal, the intended audience for this site is not altogether clear. Perhaps the goal is simply to create a platform for further investigation by anyone who wants to learn more about the Omahas. If that is the case, however, more direction is necessary. The photographs, while interesting, have very brief captions that at times identify the individuals in the image and provide nothing more. And while the collection of artifacts is impressive, the descriptors given for each image appear to be only the cataloguing information crafted by each holding institution.

Each of these two Websites contains important information for anyone interested in the respective histories of treaties and the Omaha Indians. Both are easy to navigate, and the overall presentation of the material is straightforward. At the same time, however, the sites themselves do not contain the structure and direction necessary to make all of that information as accessible and valuable as it could be.

John P. Bowes is an associate professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University and the author of Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (2007).

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

http://www.sos.mo.gov/mdh/

In 2007, Missouri’s Secretary of State Robin Carnahan proposed an initiative to increase public access to materials relevant to the history of the state. The resulting Website, Missouri Digital Heritage, created in conjunction with the Missouri State Library, the Missouri State Archives, and the State Historical Society of Missouri, is already sufficiently developed to make it a necessary first stop for anyone interested in the history of Missouri. Although the purported goal is to “further Missourians’ access,” anyone can mine this ambitious site to good effect.

One impressive and very useful feature of the site lies in its function as a central clearinghouse for information about the state. In an effort to be comprehensive, the site’s creators are engaged in “assisting institutions across the state in digitizing their records and placing them online for easy access.” What that means in practice is that much of the preliminary, time-consuming work involved in searching the Web for credible, usable sources can be avoided; the task has already been performed by careful teams of archivists and curators.

Under varied topic headings—such as agriculture, cultures and communities, newspapers, county and municipal records, exploration and settlement, family and faith, and many others—the site offers links to materials from libraries, museums, government agencies, and universities throughout the state. Links to outside Websites of interest, including brief descriptions, direct visitors to such varied items as an online map exhibit from the St. Louis Public Library; “Quest for the Cure: Care and Treatment in Missouri’s First State Mental Hospital,” from the Missouri State Archives; an illustrated history of the Missouri Botanical Garden (1800-1920), contributed by that institution; and the Grayson Archery Collection from the University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology.

The merits of this collaborative enterprise become clear when one clicks on the collection heading “St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project.” This gateway leads to “digitized collections of court files relating to Lewis & Clark, Native Americans, the fur trade, and slave freedom suits,” including a database of all court cases, beginning in 1804. The introduction to these materials details what has been processed: 86 cubic feet of records covering the period 1804-1835 and 39 cubic feet of selected cases post-1835 (as of February 2006). A keyword searchable database for the digitized records works well. Typing in “Lisa” for Manuel Lisa as a search term generates several cases. Clicking on “view case” brings up six pages of very high quality images. The paper may be torn and the ink faded, but the researcher can view the manuscripts carefully, using both a link for a larger image and the zoom function on a computer to enlarge the image exponentially, a helpful tool for reading such documents. The “Freedom Suits” section includes 301 petitions from 1814 to 1860; “Fur Trade Cases” includes 82 cases regarding Missouri and neighboring territories; and “Native American Suits” includes 32 cases involving Native Americans.

For researchers, the “Archives and Manuscripts Collections Guides” section offers finding aids and detailed descriptions for Missouri records. Of broad interest and vast potential usefulness are areas covered by the Missouri State Archives: the “Missouri Birth & Death Records Database Pre-1910” and the “Missouri Coroner’s Inquest Database,” covering the period 1842-1932, both contain huge amounts of data. On the latter, records are searchable but not reproduced. Searching this author’s surname generates eight results, covering such causes of death as “Justifiable Homicide,” “Run Over By Train,” and “Visitation Of God in A Natural Way.” For more details on these cases, one would need to request copies of the records directly from the state archives; an e-mail link is provided for doing so. Under “Collections,” one can also examine the Registre d’Arpentage, the French register created by surveyor Antoine Pierre Souland (1766-1825), including maps and details of 710 land grants.

A quick overview of the site demonstrates that the myriad topics it highlights will interest scholars, students, and teachers beyond Missouri. Civil War buffs, for example, might explore online newspaper collections, searchable and in facsimile, such as the Cape Girardeau Argus, 1863-1871. Typing the term “emancipation” into the search engine generates 44 hits. One can click on the featured issues, where the term appears on flagged pages in highlighted text. Following links to the Dred Scott Case Collection, from Washington University’s library, a reader can access 111 documents in a full-text searchable form.

This Website is a welcome and important addition to resources available on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. The government initiative behind this effort to preserve the past and make it accessible is a laudable one; clearly, the “Show Me” state has much to share.

Patricia Cleary is a professor in the Department of History at California State University, Long Beach, and is the author of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (2011).

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

www.quiltindex.org

Quilt-making is often imagined as something grandmothers—your own or someone else’s—did in some timeless past. Interest in quilt-making has grown significantly in recent decades, however. The United States bicentennial sparked a renewed interest in both handicrafts and American history. Since that time, several state-wide projects have documented historic quilts held by museums and in private collections. Harnessing the power of the Internet, The Quilt Index [http://www.quiltindex.org/] now unites sixteen state quilt documentation projects with the holdings of several museums and private collections in a searchable database that will appeal to scholars and the quilt-loving public alike.

Quilt scholarship exploded in the early 1990s. As interest in quilt research grew, so did demand for a single computerized bibliography that could bring together state and regional quilt documentation projects with scholarship in the decorative arts to make quilts and quilt scholarship accessible both to scholars and the interested public. The resulting Quilt Index is a partnership of The Alliance for American Quilts, MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University, and the Michigan State University Museum. Since its 2003 launch, funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other sources have enabled a dramatic expansion in its holdings. Years of planning and research have produced a user-friendly searchable database that provides unprecedented access to quilts held by a number of museums and many more private collections, as well as interpretative essays and educational materials written by leading quilt curators and scholars.

The Quilt Index is an invaluable research and reference tool that includes images of and information on more than 50,000 quilts. Many of these quilts are held by private collectors or hidden away in museum storage areas, making them otherwise inaccessible to interested viewers. Quilt Index users can easily browse these holdings by collection, style, time period, quilt pattern, purpose, and location of production. While this browse feature would be of interest to quilt lovers, it is perhaps most useful as a starting point for research. It provides a good introduction to what types of quilts are accessible through the Index, and to the site’s cataloging system. Not surprisingly, the majority of the Index’s quilts date from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, when quilting was most popular in the United States. Its holdings are geographically concentrated in the Midwest and Upper South, where state documentation projects have been strongest. The Hawaiian Quilt Research Project brings stylistic as well as geographic diversity to the Index. While it is designed to also accommodate the global nature of quilting, at present the Index’s holdings are almost exclusively from the United States.

Researchers will benefit tremendously from the ability to search the database by several well-designed categories of information. These include: pattern name; quiltmaker; location; date; materials; fabric patterns; publications, exhibitions or contests in which the quilt appeared; and religious, ethnic, and/or cultural affiliation of the maker. The primary shortcoming for this cataloging system is one already familiar to quilt researchers: similar quilt patterns have been known by many different names. While some catalog entries list multiple variations under the pattern name, most list only one. Searching for “monkey wrench” and “churn dash” yields different lists of quilts with extremely similar quilt blocks featuring four pieced rectangles arranged in a square, with a triangle extending out from each corner. At the same time, searching for “churn dash” quilts also yields a quilt that features only Baltimore Album-style appliqué blocks. The Website’s new visual mapping initiative seeks to alleviate this problem by enabling users to search by the appearance of a block rather than by its various names.

Researchers and lay users alike will enjoy comparing quilts made from similar patterns, or quilts from a particular location or period. The default “list” display setting shows a thumbnail image of each quilt, along with its title and maker (if known), its date or date range, and the collection to which it belongs. For those more interested in viewing many quilts simultaneously, selecting the “grid” display will show images of search results in groups of sixty. From either the list or grid of search results, visitors can then click on individual quilts to read more and to see larger images of that quilt. Selecting “basic info” provides the information most users will be looking for in a user-friendly format; “full record” contains all available information on that quilt. Researchers and quilt lovers alike will appreciate the ability to drag a zoom box over images of full quilts. Utilizing the “compare” feature from either the list or grid display aligns two or more quilts for side-by-side comparison. Click on one or more of the thumbnail images to expand them; click again to close the larger image and return to the comparison screen.

For example, a search for crazy quilts yielded 3,566 results; limiting the search to those made between 1876 and 1900 yielded 1,752. (Because additional detail photographs made available for some quilts appear as separate search results, this slightly exaggerates the number of crazy quilts in the Index. Limiting by the 1876-1900 date range likely excluded a few quilts from those years because not all contributors grouped quilts by period, and production dates are not available for all quilts.) Taken as a whole, this search reveals the diversity of wild quilts made at the height of the crazy quilt craze, when middle-class American women combined odd-shaped pieces of rich velvet and satin with skilled embroidery, painting, and a good bit of whimsy. Comparing these quilts might reveal regional variations or change over time within one region’s crazy quilt designs. Studying multiple quilts made by the same quilter could highlight her technical and artistic development over time. Because many quiltmakers incorporated memorabilia into their crazy quilts, these quilts might also reveal aspects of their makers’ daily lives that are not available in the written sources normally utilized by social historians.

One particularly intriguing new feature is the “signature quilt” search function, which features name and location data for about fifty quilts with multiple signatures. Friendship, Album, or Presentation quilts were made either to remind their owners of loved ones who were moving away or to honor a special individual within the community. Other signature quilts were made as fundraisers, often charging individuals for the privilege of including their name on the quilt. Although this selection represents only a tiny subset of the vast Quilt Index, the signature quilt search holds particularly rich potential for researchers to study not only the history of the quilts themselves but also the social networks of the quilters and their broader community.

For those who prefer admiring quilts to studying them, The Quilt Index Website offers virtual museum galleries that feature images of thematic collection of quilts, accompanied by an essay about that collection written by its curator. The “Essays” page also includes virtual versions of physical museum exhibits and other essays and presentations developed for The Quilt Index. Quilt lovers will also appreciate the “Quilt of the Day” in the “News” section, which highlights the diversity of the collections available through the Index.

The Quilt Index also offers a series of lesson plans that utilize quilts to teach art, graphic design, and history. Although these lesson plans are designed for high school classrooms, they could easily be adapted for middle school or college level students. Lesson plans tailored to elementary-aged children would be a welcome addition

The Quilt Index is both a valuable research tool and an engaging Website. Its value will continue to grow with additions of more quilt collections. New initiatives underway in visual searching, mapping, and internationalization promise much. In the meantime, researchers, students and the general public will benefit from this enormous virtual collection of American quilts.

Cynthia Culver Prescott is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Dakota, specializing in gender, families, and material culture in the American West. She is the author ofGender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (2007).

John Dixon’s welcome study of Cadwallader Colden is the most comprehensive of the few biographies we have of this important North Briton colonial. Dixon’s brief book attempts a narrative of Colden’s life, an analysis of his important intellectual efforts, and an evaluation of his varied political career. His broad thesis is that Colden’s lifework and philosophy were part of a different and less understood moderate Enlightenment based on “Imperialism, elitism, and conservatism” (7). In this vein, Dixon is spot-on. As he notes, the Enlightenment in America has too long been imagined as a teleology of the American Revolution (167). Colden’s brand of Imperial fealty, elite scientific debate, and conservative political values were at the center of the British Enlightenment, and Dixon’s book is an important entry point into this world. Where Dixon’s book falters is in its ambitious breadth and its lack of engagement with the historiographical debates his subject calls to attention. The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden is a breezy 167 pages (243 pages with notes and index) and tries to encompass Colden’s personal life, his historical and scientific contributions, and his political career, philosophy, and writing. As such it necessarily treads lightly even where the subject requires more weight. Perhaps most disappointing is Dixon’s failure to engage with the literature on the creation of a British identity by “North Britons” or Scots dedicated to an Imperial Atlantic (see, for example, the work of David Armitage). This leads Dixon to pass up an important opportunity to study the new patronage-driven Imperial and royal British identity at the center of Colden’s Enlightenment—and which Colden so obviously represents.

Dixon’s study is divided into three sections that encompass Colden’s education (“Beginnings”), his scientific and other intellectual ideas or efforts (“Active Matters”), and his political career (“Politics”). This framework is held together via the narrative of Colden’s life as he departs Scotland, settles in British North America, and becomes a gentleman scholar holding the political offices and power he ambitiously pursued—culminating in his position as lieutenant governor (and acting governor) of New York on the eve of the American Revolution. As Dixon ably represents, Colden is a fascinating polymath. His maps, reports, and book on the Iroquois were seminal and important contributions to Imperial science and politics and made Colden the “leading British authority on the history and geography of New York” (77). Also of interest, and adroitly discussed in Dixon’s book, are Colden’s obvious failures in his purely scientific pursuits. Colden jumped feet-first into some of the most intensely theoretical debates of the eighteenth century. At question was the nature of matter—and thus of the universe and of God’s relationship or lack thereof with His creations. Covered in greater depth in Alfred Hoermann’s largely forgotten intellectual biography of Colden, this is no easy slog and requires a mastery of philosophical ideas not at the center of the American historical canon. Here also a central tenet of Dixon’s elite conservative Enlightenment is made explicit: the matter of consequence at the center of these transatlantic discussions was not so much how the universe worked per se, but how it worked in its relationship to God. If, as proponents of Mechanism argued, the universe had been set in motion by a distant “unmoved mover,” why need God  exist? A clockwork universe set in motion by what Samuel Clarke called a “do-nothing King” was a gateway to atheism and chaos. On the other hand, if matter itself contained agency or motion as a quality imbedded in its creation, the religious consequences were equally perilous. Deeply religious thinkers like Isaac Newton in his 1730 Opticks imagined the universe as God’s “boundless uniform Sensorium,” where God’s literal and constant will was the motor logic of all planetary and material movement. Colden’s unsuccessful challenge to Newton was also shaped by the same religious constraints. As such, then, some of the most important Enlightenment era scientific debates were shaped not by empirical analysis but by the religious beliefs and sensibilities critical to contemporaries’ vision of themselves in the universe.

Colden’s forays into these hypothetical discussions failed miserably to impress his contemporaries, but he enjoyed a number of other scientific contributions, in botany, for example, that contributed to his intellectual renown. He was, however, eminently more successful in the political realm, and Dixon’s analysis of Colden is critical to understanding a world now lost. As Dixon notes, the American Revolution and the various documents and principles stated therein have shaped and defined our understanding of the Enlightenment in America (7). Imagined this way, the Revolution stands as a seminal moment in the American Enlightenment and the nation’s founding documents its arias. Following this logic, the political principles and hierarchies at the center of the Empire are cast as unenlightened systems of exploitation and oppression foisted on colonials by arrogant Britons and overturned by the enlightened Revolutionaries. Dixon’s biography of Colden provides an important counter to that narrative and resurrects Colden as an important Enlightenment political figure loyal to the Empire and what Dixon refers to as the “national interest” (67). In both his service as surveyor general, lieutenant governor, acting governor and other lesser offices—as well as his factional struggles, Colden was driven by Enlightened and decidedly British political ideals, such as the balance of power seated in the unwritten British constitution (138).  It is here, however, where Dixon’s analysis misses an opportunity to explain the complexity of Imperial politics, the new transnational British identity, and pre-Revolutionary socio-political relationships.

The broader confusion surrounding these ideas shone forth for me the other day as I sat with my daughter watching—for the first and last time—the film version of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992). There is much to regret in this romantic romp, but when a British soldier—likely a Scot—screamed out to the startled Indians, “England is sovereign!” I was definitely confused. Colden was the prototypical North Briton whose Imperial allegiance was part of the construction of a transnational “royal,” Imperial, and British identity based on patronage, and critical to understanding the Enlightenment nature of the British Empire. The British Empire and the consequent British identity (not English) were created by transient men and women—for well-known historical reasons, many of them Scots—who set out on watery domains, constructing along the way new social and transnational political identities that were, in their day, a contagion for new ways of looking at the world. They created a commercial, political, and intellectual world based on political love for a monarch, economic interest in an Imperial (not national) world  order, and a desire for stability and what they understood as progress.

But why does this matter for Dixon’s book? Missed opportunities abound in all books and it is a valuable axiom of reviewers to not criticize an author for a book he or she did not write. It matters because Dixon fails to adequately explore or explain the socio-political relationships that drove men like Colden in the Imperial world and are critical to the very Enlightenment he seeks to spotlight. Colden is presented by Dixon variously as a reformer against “corruption” for “the national interest” (67) and then, conversely, as a “corrupt” politician who as surveyor general manipulated land grants to his and then Governor Cosby’s favor (94). The word “corruption” is bandied about rather loosely here, with men seeking to profit from their political relationships and positions imagined as morally suspect. Dixon, for example, presents Horace Walpole, British Auditor General of the Plantations, as “corrupt” for upholding the royal prerogative and collecting fees related to auditing the revenue of New York (68). Walpole was, of course, entitled to demand such fees (and send a deputy in his place). Indeed, New York’s reluctance to pay such fees was an illegal and dangerous challenge to the Imperial order—and Colden’s Enlightenment. This characterization of colonial politics as inherently corrupt even when lawful is consistent with the familiar narrative that usually culminates with the old world order swept away by a better democratic future. The corruption Dixon alludes to, however, is the machinery of a political, social, and economic structure based on patronage. Further, patronage, and the consequent corruption, as Alexander Hamilton noted, were the genius of the British political system, bringing men into political and economic relationships that wove together and transformed often competing ethno-religious-kinship networks—therein bringing stability and prosperity to the British Empire and to British North America. In other words, patronage, and the seeming corruption at its heart, were critical to the transnational British Imperial identity and system at the center of Colden’s Enlightenment.

Colden benefitted throughout his life from this elite and conservative Imperial Enlightenment. It brought him power, prosperity, and the leisure and license to pursue scientific ideas which, though they often failed him, were critical to his worldview and sense of purpose. He was not the author of these political and social structures, but he was their loyal servant, and as such his life, and Dixon’s book, offer us an excellent entry point into this world long-lost.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

Jose R. Torre is an associate professor and chair of the History Department, College at Brockport. He is the editor of The Enlightenment in America, four volumes (2010).