Virginia Library Research Articles

“So Majestic a Monument of Antiquity”: Landscape, Knowledge, and Authority in the Early National West

“So Majestic a Monument of Antiquity”Landscape, Knowledge, and Authority in the Early National West Whitney A. Martinko (bio) In the spring of 1791, the Ohio Company of Associates was consumed with questions about the ornamentation of town squares. In the young town of Marietta, the first legal settlement in the Northwest Territory, the Associates formulated a detailed outline of how each public space should be planted and maintained. In one instance, they legislated that the square named Quadranaou be planted with a specific pattern of sugar maple, white maple, and mulberry trees and directed that “the Elevated square with the Ascents leading to the same be immediately put into Grass, and hereafter no other ways occupied—[ and] the whole to be left in good Post and Rail fence.” Likewise, they delegated the care of a raised road called the Sacra Via to their most respected leader; he was expected to “attend particularly to its preservation in its present form and seed it to Grass.”1 While the Associates directed the care of these spaces, they had not constructed the central features of these squares (Figure 1). The geometric earth forms at their centers were part of a mysterious complex of earthworks at the junction of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, which Company leaders had scouted in the 1780s. The Company chose this site for its new town, and rather than ignoring or destroying the features, the men venerated and publicized them. Two centuries later, archaeologists would identify these features and objects excavated from within them as the products of the native Adena and Hopewell peoples, who lived in the Ohio River Valley between 1000 BC and 500 AD (Figure 2).2 But in the early republic, the features provided enigmatic evidence of former inhabitants of the American continent. After all, the Native Americans who lived in the Ohio country professed no specific knowledge of the structures. By labeling the earthworks and the objects uncovered from them “American antiquities,” western migrants convinced citizens throughout the United States that these landmarks would inform the history of their new nation. As the traffic of settlers and travelers increased in the Ohio Valley after 1800, the importance of antiquities to national culture shifted. After Ohio became a state in 1803, its residents sought recognition as authorities on the landscape by contrasting their own observations with those of outsiders, calling them generic, exaggerated, or both. In publishing their own findings and theories, residents began to link the collection and discussion of antiquities primarily to Ohio and only secondarily to the nation as a whole. In the 1810s, this search for local authority prompted some Ohioans to establish institutions, correspondence networks, and publications throughout the state to produce information about the West, in the West. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A rare threedimensional depiction of the Marietta earthworks before settlement, likely sketched by Rufus Putnam. Printed in Harris, Journal of a Tour, n.p., Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. This study of the ways that Ohioans created knowledge about western lands, and in turn, about themselves, engages two bodies of historical literature: works about western landscape and identity and studies about the development of American intellectual networks and cultural institutions. Historians have long recognized that “from the beginning Americans had sought [End Page 29] their identity in their relationship to the land they had settled.”3 In order to appraise how westerners built state and regional identities, some historians have discussed the importance of the Land Ordinance of 1785 in imposing a grid on the landscape. Others have argued that the economic relationships that developed along the Ohio River and subsequent transportation networks unified Ohioans.4 Yet in explaining identity vis-à-vis landscape, these studies invoke a process by which settlers internalized a landscape feature as a symbol or common experience without detailing how this process transpired and created a shared identity.5 In another body of literature, historians have detailed the formation of transatlantic intellectual networks during colonial expansion and the effect that American independence had on this system. Yet none has examined how similar processes occurred during western expansion in the United States. Scholars who have studied American...

The Library of Virginia: Start Your Affair with Books

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

Promoting Library Services at Fintel Library (Roanoke College)

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

President's Column: Libraries, Books, Readers, and Writers

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

Fairfax County Public Library - Reaching Out to Readers

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

The Danville Public Library Spreads Literacy, Reading, and Opportunity to Ex-Offenders

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Group Encourages Reading and Provides a Social Hub

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

Our Youngest Patrons: Early Childhood Literacy at Potomac Library

Virginia Libraries features peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed research, best practices, emerging trends, and discussion of key issues in the field from all libraries (academic, corporate, public, school, special), with a focus on the Virginia library community.

Social History and Local Records: Historical Methods, Archival Theory, and the Library of Virginia

ABSTRACT Local records are the foundation on which social history is constructed. However, in an era when most historians categorize themselves as social historians, it is amazing to note how much these primary resources appear to be underutilized in scholarly works. This article attempts to understand why this is so by investigating how it is that historians seek resources and how archivists make them available. It then proposes possible solutions beneficial to both the institutions and the researchers alike on how to make the most of these often difficult to access records.

Local to Global: The Importance of State-Level Journals to Library Literature

While the publishing needs of many state library associations are comfortably served by newsletters and Web sites, a number of state library associations produce major library journals that serve readers beyond their state membership. The author interviewed the editors of five state association journals: Alki: The Washington Library Association Journal, Colorado Libraries, North Carolina Libraries, Texas Library Journal, and Virginia Libraries. The editors were asked to comment on the role, challenges, and future of state-level library journals.

Local to Global: The Importance of State-Level Journals to Library Literature

While the publishing needs of many state library associations are comfortably served by newsletters and Web sites, a number of state library associations produce major library journals that serve readers beyond their state membership. The author interviewed the editors of five state association journals: Alki: The Washington Library Association Journal, Colorado Libraries, North Carolina Libraries, Texas Library Journal, and Virginia Libraries. The editors were asked to comment on the role, challenges, and future of state-level library journals.

<i>Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic</i>, and: <i>Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, and: Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South Sarah Robbins Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. By Mary Kelley . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. 294 pp. $39.95. Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South. By Catherine Kerrison. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 265 pp. $49.95. Although the ideology of separate spheres dominated scholarship on women’s culture for years, publications such as the No More Separate Spheres! anthology edited by Cathy N. Davidson (and based on a special issue of American Literature) marked a shift echoed in numerous studies since then. Both Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak and Catherine Kerrison’s Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South share an affiliation with such work, showing that American women in earlier eras were not, in fact, consigned solely to domestic spaces and exiled entirely from engagement in public life. Much of this scholarship has focused on women’s efforts to write for publication, but Kerrison’s and Kelley’s new books emphasize women’s educational experiences as a key to understanding the evolution of gender roles in US culture. One hallmark of both these fine books is their effort to mine archival sources to uncover the literacy practices of American women from earlier eras. (This commitment to recovery work is reflected in the striking illustrations in both texts, though Kelley’s does boast a much more extensive collection of images.) Viewing literacy as including women’s personal writing and reading, as well as their use of oral skills in social settings, Kelley and Kerrison each regard the complex culture of women’s pre- and post-Revolutionary literacy practices as a rich terrain for study. Both books also share the compelling strategy of combining treatment of well-recognized figures (e.g., Fanny Fern [Sara Parton] and Harriet Beecher Stowe for Kelley; Susanna Rowson for Kerrison) with vivid accounts of less familiar women. Accordingly, Kelley offers a case study of Harriet Burleigh Janes, whose authorial output progressed from homemade [End Page 162] miniature books to submissions for a “Children’s Corner” feature in a Bostonbased periodical to regular stories for Harry Hazel’s Yankee Blade and other publications (60–64). Similarly, Kerrison extends an inventory of the earlyeighteenth- century Virginia library proudly displayed by William Byrd II to include an account of his moves to restrict his wife Lucy’s reading; Kerrison then counters that vignette with a discussion of the long-time book collector Lady Jean Skipwith, whose extensive purchases about one hundred years later were facilitated by the increased availability of print text—but also by her many years living as a widow of independent means. Learning to Stand and Speak and Claiming the Pen share a focus on relatively privileged white women, an emphasis that is consistent with archival collections having a far larger record of literacy practices from this group than from others whose access to reading and writing has historically been even more constrained. Nonetheless, devoting more attention to the causes behind these gaps, to their lingering effects, and to the sources that are available from women of different race and class backgrounds could have strengthened both of these very worthwhile studies. Despite their similar methodologies and themes, these two nuanced studies differ in ways allowing each to make a distinctive contribution. One key difference is the time periods addressed: Kerrison concentrates on the eighteenth century (though she dips back into early colonial days occasionally and ends with a quick survey of more recent developments); Kelley focuses on the decades after the American Revolution through the pre-Civil War years. Another important difference—and one clearly related to their contrasting chronological frames— is the venues for learning each scholar chooses to explore. For Kerrison, informal learning sites and practices are crucial. To recover the learning experiences of eighteenth-century southern women banned from the schooling open to young men, she argues...

A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century Donna J. Spindel A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century. By Warren M. Billings. (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2004, Pp. xxii, 284.) No historian is better equipped to write an institutional history of seventeenth-century Virginia than is Warren Billings, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of New Orleans. This study is a welcome addition to his long list of publications on the evolution of government in early Virginia. Billings focuses on the Virginia assembly, but there is also a great deal contained here on the development of the judicial system and on the office of governor. He is intimately acquainted with the primary source material which provides the foundation for this study. With his usual graceful writing style, he has crafted a very readable account of a subject that might be tedious in less skillful hands. The author asserts early on that he made no attempt to make comparisons with other colonies because colonial governments tended to operate in isolation. However, to understand the inner workings of Virginia government is to open a window into the operation of government in general throughout British Colonial America. The book is divided conveniently and logically into two parts—a history of early Virginia government and a biographical study of the major political players of that time period. At the heart of this study is Billings's contention that the early Virginia assembly, like other arenas in early America, evolved from a "corporate appendage" into a "little parliament," not by design, necessarily, but as a result of the efforts of the leading figures in government. This evolution occurred roughly by the 1650s, at which time members of the assembly were specifically embracing parliamentary procedures with which they were familiar. In this way the House of Burgesses built for itself a solid foundation from which to govern. A second salient point considers the way in which the assembly became bicameral—not, as conventional scholarship would say, to mimic the British Parliament, but rather, under Governor William Berkeley's leadership, for reasons of expediency. Billings argues that this change marked a crucial milepost in the evolution of government since it afforded the assembly a structure that enhanced its ability to operate as a representative assembly. During Virginia's earliest years as a royal colony, given the turmoil in England, it is not surprising that the Crown allowed a considerable distance to grow between England and America. In this context, governors, councilors, and assembly members could follow their own paths and assert their independence. If there is a heroic figure in this account, it is William [End Page 116] Berkeley, a man of great ability who steered the colony with enormous skill and diplomacy through challenging times. His downfall, a familiar part of the story, came in the 1670s as Bacon's Rebellion and turmoil in England intersected with his declining health. But it is not just Berkeley's story which matters. The House of Burgesses itself, having enjoyed nearly half a century of growing independence and stature, also reached a turning point amidst colonial strife and the Restoration in Britain. As the power of the governor strengthened, the power and stature of the assembly declined. One of the great strengths of this study is its effectiveness in bringing to life a century of legislative development during a period of history for which the documentary evidence can be frustratingly scarce. Billings, however, has the knowledge and expertise to fill in the gaps with astute and intelligent explanations. Perhaps he might have revealed a bit more of the rich context of early Virginia history in which institutional development took place. By that is meant a deeper examination or analysis of the Virginia landscape in terms of society, gender, and race. To be sure, this study is about the Virginia general assembly in the seventeenth century, but no institution operates in a vacuum. Native Americans in this study appear essentially as obstacles to white advancement. Women appear as wives and daughters of prominent families. Slaves appear intermittently and largely as objects of legislation. In fairness, perhaps these omissions, if averted...

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Transforming the Document Delivery and Resource Sharing Engine

The paper explores the periphery of emerging technologies and roles for document delivery and resource sharing with a focus on sharing best practices for adaptative strategies using practical examples such as new training programs and methods to collaboratively explore and adopt emergent technologies and web services, and new partnerships. Examples of emergent technologies and web services include: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), mobile technologies, social networking software and services. Examples of new partnerships include: collaborative strategies for resource sharing within libraries; acquisitions, digital libraries, reference, and with vendors. Examples of new training programs include: ALA RUSA STARS Education Committee, training programs at the University of Virginia Libraries and other resources.

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Blogging: An Introductory Look at an Old Pastime in a New Medium

PurposeThis article was written to offer an introduction to blogging.Design/methodology/approachThe initial research was undertaken as a project stemming from a request to present on blogging at the Virginia Library Association Paraprofessional Annual Conference in May of 2006.FindingsThe article covers a range of topics from history, to a description of what a blog is, and why to create or use one (personally and professionally).Originality/valueLibraries have only just begun to think about blogging and this introductory piece may help novices.

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia

Virginia Reviews: Reviews prepared by staff members of the Library of Virginia