IATH and the Community

The Architecture of The Negro Travelers' Green Book is a public architectural history project that studies the sites listed in The Green Book to discover their history and support their preservation. This project reveals the overlooked history of mid-twentieth century African Americans and the unsung people who formed the backbone of the African-American tourist industry: the women who ran tourist homes, the men who opened motels to take advantage of increasing automobile traffic, and the business owners who offered beauty, entertainment, and style to middle class African Americans. Seeking to document every site listed in The Green Book, this public database allows users to explore this history and its associated sites by year, state, establishment type, and owner.

Some 450,000 men from slave states wore the Union blue during the Civil War. This project's database contains all known black Virginians from Albemarle County who served in the Union Army or Navy. We have identified over 230 men who enlisted and served in over 70 different regiments and five different ships. This project would not have been possible without the generous help of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. A second phase will identify University of Virginia students who fought in the Union military.

William Tyndale (c.1495-1536) is best known as the translator of the first New Testament to be printed in English (1526), but he also wrote a series of books that engaged some of the most debated topics of sixteenth-century Europe, including social inequity and unrest, the ideas of Martin Luther, the "great matter" of Henry VIII's divorce from both Catherine of Aragon and the Roman church, educational reform, literacy, governmental policies, and theological controversy. He confronted, in print, two of the most influential writers of the time, Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, honing the English language as he crafted his arguments and responses. The project, based at James Madison University and published by IATH, will provide critical editions of seven volumes of Tyndale's work.

The African American story in Charlottesville-Albemarle remains largely untold. The Heritage Trails focus on sites that provide a broad understanding of the lives of enslaved and free Black and emancipated peoples in our area.

A reconstruction of the mosaic of tomb markers that once covered the floors, walls, and yards of Renaissance Florentine cityscape and surrounded its citizens with ubiquitous reminders of the city's past, present, and future. By correlating large numbers of memorials, rather than focusing on a single institution or type of monument, this project will create a topography of tombs that brings us closer to how Renaissance Florentines experienced death and commemoration.

A digital archive of maps, photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, public documents, and other media. "The Countryside Transformed" shows how the coming in 1884 of the railroad to the counties of Accomack and Northampton profoundly changed the physical and mental landscapes in which the people of the region lived, worked, and traveled.

This project is an international collaboration that will provide integrated access to dispersed collections of northern European art and artifacts from the early medieval period (4th – 12th centuries). The goal is to facilitate interdisciplinary access and research in art, archaeology, history, and literary and religious studies, and promote new discovery and comparative analysis of artifacts.

The project seeks to create resources that will increase public appreciation of cultural landscapes as complex records of past values and actions, and to improve professional capacity to imagine alternative futures for those cultural landscapes. It will explain through text, maps, photos, diagrams, plans, and section-perspectives the relational nature of bio-physical systems, extraction industries such as agriculture and mining, demographic shifts, and settlement patterns. The atlases will afford users an exciting laboratory for long-term study and engagement with compelling cultural landscapes and their communities. The first atlases will focus on two cultural landscapes in Virginia, but a major concern is to develop a series of comparative atlases examining similar cultural landscapes in different regions and countries.

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. The goal is to help scholars from different disciplines use archaeological evidence to advance our historical understanding of the slave-based society that evolved in the Atlantic World during the colonial and ante-bellum periods. The archive was conceived and built by archaeologists at Monticello, with the collaboration of archaeologists, historians, and research institutions from across the Atlantic World. As a result, DAACS serves as a model for the use of the Web to foster new kinds of scholarly collaboration and data sharing among archaeologists working in a single region.

The DAACS Research Consortium (DRC) is a novel kind of collaboration among scholars based in scattered academic and research institutions, built on the foundation offered by the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). The DRC is designed to advance DAACS' two primary goals: to foster inter-site, comparative archeological research that will advance our historical understanding of the slavery-based societies that evolved in the Atlantic World during the early-modern era; and to serve as a useful model for the use of the web to encourage new kinds of scholarly collaboration and data sharing among archaeologists working in a single culture-historical context.

The Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA), a website devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, her writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work. The DEA is produced by the Dickinson Editing Collective, with four general editors working collaboratively with one another and with numerous coeditors, staff, and users.

The Emily Dickinson International Society was incorporated in 1988 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to promote, perpetuate, and enhance the study and appreciation of Emily Dickinson throughout the world. Members in the EDIS foster the goals of the Society, participate in meetings and conferences, and receive Society publications (Emily Dickinson Bulletin and Emily Dickinson Journal).

The ESMN is a consortium of fourteen member organizations, established in 2009, with the long-term goal of creating a federated resource for Eastern Shore Heritage (FRESH), an on-line resource centered on the rich history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. ESMN, with support from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, will act as a union catalog for the holdings of historical societies.

IATH is working with the University of Virginia's Fralin Museum of Art to 3D models of objects held in the Fralin's collections. Each collection lists the objects it comprises and for each object gives information about the object and access to the various datasets defining the 3D models acquired.

The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society was founded on July 14, 1825, and has distinguished itself as the oldest continuously existing collegiate debating society in North America, and indeed the second-oldest Greek-lettered organization in the United States. The Society membership includes Edgar Allan Poe, former Virginia Governor James Gilmore, President Woodrow Wilson and former University President John T. Casteen III. The Society is in process of creating an archive, in conjunction with IATH and UVA Library Special Collections.

This project is being run by Sweet Briar College Professor Lynn Rainville, expert on the history of the college. Rainville is director of the Tusculum Institute at the college, which is dedicated to sharing historic resources and disseminating information about local history. IATH will be hosting the center's digital materials.

A central repository for information and data pertinent to all the known slave houses in the United States. The database is designed to include geographic information; ownership history; local, state and national historic listings; architectural information; completed surveys and documentation; archaeological excavations; census data; genealogical references and ex-slave narrative descriptions. It is a crosswalk for diverse fields (architecture, architectural history, anthropology, archaeology, historic preservation, history, genealogy and folk culture) to access and reference, and can be used to identify, locate, analyze and interpret slave houses, as well as connect to other existing resources.

Between 1820-65, the American Colonialization Society sponsored the migration of almost 13,000 African Americans to the new colony of Liberia, maintaining careful records of the emigrants, the letters sent back to family and communities from their difficult and dangerous new home, and the people who enabled, supported, and coerced both free and enslaved to make the long transatlantic journey. This project is building a comprehensive dataset of 3,650 Virginia emigrants in this period, based on documents, ship records, and letters, which will explore the complex relationships and motivations behind this remarkable effort.