LC National Digital Library Program announces the release of the Thomas Jefferson Papers

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This information is being widely cross-posted.

From: Library of Congress National Digital Library Program ndlpcoll@xxxxxxx

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.