Introducing the Ideas in Action Project

But first things first, I’m Eric Johnson, the coordinator of the Ideas in Action: Virginians Petition Their Government, 1776-1786 project, a three-year initiative at the Library of Virginia funded by the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission (VA250). We kicked off the project this past January, and I have been intending to introduce it in detail for some time now. Thanks to the efforts of many people, the work is advancing rapidly, so now is a good time to pause and share what’s been happening.

The overall goal of the Ideas in Action project is to make the first-hand stories of Revolutionary-era daily life—as recorded in certain collections we hold at the Library of Virginia—more accessible to students, researchers, and all those who are interested, in Virginia and beyond.  To achieve this, the project consists of three separate but interrelated components:

The Ideas in Action project focuses on two key sets of documents.  The first is a subset of the wider collection of legislative petitions held at the Library of Virginia.  Legislative petitions were the main way that Virginians shared concerns and made requests of the state legislature.  The Library holds some 25,000 petitions and related documents spanning from before the American Revolution up through the Civil War, and the Ideas in Action project focuses on the 3,400 of them that either date from the Revolution or that were written after the Revolution but are about those Revolutionary years. Virginians of all backgrounds could petition the legislature: men or women, enslaved or free, property-holding or penniless. They wrote for assistance with community concerns, such as matters of religious liberty or the need for county boundary changes, and with personal concerns, such as requests for divorce or petitions for manumission.  Often, petitions in our collection are accompanied by supporting documents such as affidavits from neighbors, maps, wills, and other materials.

Some 400 declarations for Revolutionary War pensions make up the second set of documents we are using at the kickoff of the project. In the early 19th century, the federal government enacted a series of laws to provide Revolutionary War veterans and their families with pensions.  In order to qualify for a federal pension under the various acts, those veterans or family members went to local courts to attest to the veterans’ service, sharing the narrative of their service and including information such as the location of enlistment, officers’ names, comrades’ names, battles fought, and wounds received.  These documents are a wonderful way to understand the wartime experiences of individual soldiers and sailors.

Because both sets of documents are primarily arranged by locality, we are in the exciting position of being able to share the stories contained in these records with the communities from which they came. This “local focus” threads through all three of the components of the project.

The documents in the Ideas in Action project have been digitized (scanned digitally and made available on Library of Virginia web systems) but most are not yet transcribed.  Full-text transcriptions help make documents more accessible for historians, genealogists, archivists, and other researchers, aiding users in searching and comparing the content of historical documents without having to wrestle with hard-to-read images or handwriting.

The project offers interested people the opportunity to contribute to the effort of transcribing project documents by using FromThePage, a web-based system that has been used by the Library and other cultural heritage organizations for years to engage participants in remote and in-person document transcription efforts.  A selection of Ideas in Action documents is currently available for anybody to access on the project’s FromThePage site (registration is required). The majority of our documents, however, aren’t yet openly available on that site because we want to hold them for use in in-person transcription events held in communities throughout the state. These transcribe-a-thons are hands-on, group activities often held in public libraries or similar venues. There we acquaint participants with the idea of transcription, introduce the FromThePage system, and then spend another hour or so transcribing local documents from the Ideas in Action collection. Doing that work together is a great way to support one another in navigating the historical writing and terminology—and it’s a lot of fun.  If you or an organization in your community are interested in arranging a local or remote transcribe-a-thon, feel free to reach out via the form on the project page.

Through a partnership with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, the Ideas in Action project is developing an educational website and portal that will offer themed modules for use by K-12 educators who wish to use the project’s documents to introduce particular aspects of Revolutionary Virginia to their students, along with additional resources (such as a guide to petitioning local and state governments today) and creative access through map and subject search interfaces.  The site is intentionally being designed with room to add resources down the road, such as a biographical database of petition signers.

The site will include introductory essays by renowned historians introducing the documents and the themed modules, a searchable catalog of documents, the map and theme interfaces, and a resource page where the themed modules and other educational materials will live.

Because the documents are all arranged by locality, we have built-in ways to share the stories they contain of community and individual life in Virginia back to the places from which they originated. In the spring, I began reaching out to VA250 local committees, local library systems, historical societies, and other groups to offer three kinds of programs:

And I’m excited to report that communities across the state are certainly responding! In the last two weeks I have spoken at six events in all three corners of the Commonwealth and points in between, with another two dozen events scheduled and many more in the works. The event calendar on the project page will show where and when to find project programs.  And if you or your organization might be interested in hosting one or more of these events over the next year or two, please send an inquiry using the contact form at the bottom of that page.

And finally, just by way of quick background, I joined the Library of Virginia in January to coordinate this project after serving more than twelve years as the head of the Creative Technologies and Scholarship department at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. Prior to that, I had stints at the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library, Monticello, and the University of Richmond. I even worked as a part-time public services archivist in what was then the Virginia State Library & Archives (now Library of Virginia) while I was earning my master’s degree in American history from George Mason University. I also have a master’s in library and information studies from Florida State University and in cartography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I am utterly thrilled to return to my public history roots with such a timely and thoroughly engaging project!