Landscapes of the American Past: Visualizing Emancipation

The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond proposes Landscapes of the American Past,an online atlas of American history, as a tool for organizing and interpreting a part of the outpouring of digital materials over the past twenty years and as a tool for thinking spatially about the past. In the start-up period, we will produce "Landscapes of Emancipation," the first detailed map of emancipation yet published, and answer questions about when, where, and how emancipation emerged from the Civil War. In doing so, we will also address a question of increasing interest in the digital humanities: how can we produce maps that rely on and support open resources while at the same time creating effective and elegant visualizations that convey scholarly arguments? We will publish our findings online as a mapping application, in peer-reviewed essays, as freely accessible data and metadata, and in a white paper addressing the methodology of visualizing historical arguments

Everyman as Master (Book Review)

Ayers, Edward L. Review of Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, by Theodore Rosengarten. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,1987

The United States on the Eve of the Civil War

The four-year war that eventually descended on the nation seemed impossible only months before it began. Powerful conflicts pulled the United States apart in the decades before 1860, but shared interests, cultures, and identities tied the country together, sometimes in new ways. So confident were they in the future that Americans expected that the forces of cohesion would triumph over the forces of division

The Trials of Robert Ryland

Robert Ryland tried to behave in a generous Christian way with the African-American people among whom he lived all his life even as he presided over what he recognized was a compromised form of the church. He faced skepticism and criticism from all sides, and experienced considerable doubt, but he pressed on

An Overview: The Difference Slavery made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities

Using digital media, we wanted to give readers full access to a scholarly argument, the historiography about it, and the evidence for it. Our early models of the article contained neat squares and lines and carefully arranged explanations of the links from one part to another. Through two sets of readings by peer reviewers and presentations to a range of audiences, we have revised our presentation and our argument while maintaining the original purpose of the article. This essay introduces the electronic article and explains its development, as well as our intentions for it

Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers\u27 Homes in the New South (Book Review)

Review of the book, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers\u27 Homes in the New South by R.B Rosenburg. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993

Virginia History as Southern History: The Nineteenth Century

This essay briefly surveys some of the best work that has been done over the last ten years or so in the field of nineteenth-century Virginia and southern history in general, hoping to supply inspiration for histories yet to be written

Homicide and History

Violence seems more threatening today than in the relatively recent past. For centuries, crime was kept out of sight. The criminal classes were segregated from the rest of society. Newspapers, police, and courts paid relatively little attention to crimes among the poor. Today, things are different: television news thrives on scenes of flashing lights, distraught parents, and bloody sidewalks. Police continually patrol parts of town they used to ignore. Modern transportation permits members of the dangerous classes to range more widely than before. As a result, the general population is far more aware of violence now than in the past

A More-Radical Online Revolution

Whatever the discipline, the new online world must find ways to help create new knowledge. Online education cannot run indefinitely, as it does now, on borrowed intellectual capital, disseminating what we already know. Higher education takes its energy, its purpose, from a charged circuit between teaching and research, between sharing knowledge and making knowledge. New forms of teaching must be able to generate new ideas

Cyberspace, U.S.A.

I write not of Thomas Jefferson\u27s town, where I live, nor of the American South to which I have devoted my working life. Rather, I write of a new American place, one we cannot see but whose effects we increasingly feel: cyberspace. That place, simultaneously metaphorical and tangible, has touched every part of the United States. Information surges along networks of copper and glass, weaving ever tighter webs across the country and the world